Start Your Self Promotion
TweetPosted By Scath on June 16, 2009
Okay, you’ve written the Bestest Book Evar and have decided self publishing is your chosen route for whatever your reasons may be.
You are now facing this wall that goes up into the clouds with no end in sight. It’s called Self Promotion. It’s thickly plastered with ads promising to shoot your book (and you) straight to the moon and make you into a self publishing superstar!
Ignore those.
Seriously.
Except the ones that tell you that your first handhold up that wall is to create your own website. It’s a fact that any endeavor involving selling something requires this extremely important step. Your website is your virtual home with an open invite for anyone to stop by and visit. It’s the place where you are in complete control of what is presented to those visitors, the number one stopping spot to find out about you as a writer and person, as well as about your books.
Before you freak out because ‘It’s expensive!’ or ‘I don’t know anything about building a website!’ just keep reading. It’s really not very difficult or expensive, people. You don’t have to be an internet guru to build a nice looking website. Promise.
This is what you need to set up your own website:
A domain name
A webhost
The ability to read and follow instructions.
The hardest portion is selecting your domain name. If your name is ‘John Smith’, there’s a good chance JOHNSMITH.COM is already taken by someone who shares your name. Make a list of names you like, perhaps 4-5, to make certain you’re able to register one of them.
Suggestions are: your name or pen name; the title of your series, if you’re writing a series; a play on one of your titles or characters’ names or something about writing. For example, I present my blog here, Feral Intensity. That’s the title of my first book in my first series of such. Also, I have ShadowConnor.com, which is the main character’s name and that site is dedicated to the series.
You want something easy to remember. Skip hyphens (unless your name/pen name has a hyphen present: John Smith-Doe.com).
Once you have your list, it’s time to check their availability and find a web host. That first part could be a process you repeat a few times before you do find an available domain name.
Most web hosts also register domain names as part of their service, so you can check availability once you’ve selected a web host.
Just an FYI: I’m using our hosting biz as an example because it’s counterproductive for me to promote someone else’s. That doesn’t mean there aren’t several great web hosting providers out there for you to select from.
Domain name registration isn’t expensive, regardless of some of the ads you may have noticed. If you pay more than $10 – $12 a year for a .COM, .NET, .ORG, .US, .INFO, .BIZ or .NAME domain name registration and live in the US, you’re overpaying. Other domain name extensions usually are more expensive, depending on your country of residence.
My domain name registration for each of mine is $ 9.95 a year. I’ve stuck with .COM for most.
Before we go any further, let me say that I know there are a lot of sites that offer free hosting and that will seem like a really good way to go for your first site, but don’t.
Just don’t.
AOL, Yahoo, etc free sites aren’t professional looking because they plaster ads all over the place. Their tools for building sites usually suck. Some have a very limited daily bandwidth allowance. I know this; I’ve tried them out myself in the past (and that’s partly why we started our own hosting biz).
Some sites offer free hosting if you register your domain name through them and may actually own your domain name, which will make it difficult for you to transfer it to a better host down the road.
Who wants to build up some traffic and buzz to YOURNAME.COM and later decide ‘yeah, I shouldn’t have picked So&SoFreeHosting’, then discover they have to start over building a site up because So&SoFreeHosting had some fine print that says they own the domain name unless you pay some huge fee to buy it from them?
Right, no one does.
Choosing a web host can seem overwhelming, but I’ll make it very simple for you: pick one that has hosting packages that include Fantastico. You’ll thank me for this if you’ve no experience in building a site and my future posts on this subject are based on that choice being made.
Website hosting fees do not have to run you into the hundreds of dollars a year. Most small web hosts offer very reasonable monthly fees, a good selection of hosting packages and are usually quicker to respond to any problems than larger hosting companies.
With your domain name and web host selected, your next step is to sign up and pay for the first year of domain registration and first month of hosting. Once that’s done, you’ll receive a receipt for your payment and information that tells you how to log into your control panel.
This part may require some patience on your part, because your domain has to propagate onto servers worldwide and that can take up to 72 hours in some cases. The web host has absolutely no control over the length of time it takes, folks. It takes as long as it takes and there’s no way to hurry the matter along.
Step one is logging into your administrative area (CPanel).
Step two is setting up an email account you’ll use for your site: me@mysite.com, for example.
Step three is returning to the main page and scrolling down until you see ‘Fantastico’. Click on it, and you’ll be presented with a list of options that can be installed.
If you don’t have a preference or some experience with one of those already, I highly recommend WordPress. It’s not just a blogging platform, but so much more. It also has a pretty low learning curve, oodles of free themes and plugins, plus a gigantic community of users to tap for advice or help if you need it.
For example, if you choose to sell e-books through your site, there’s a plugin for that. I’m using it (nods to the left sidebar).
WordPress is the awesomeness, and that’s not just my personal opinion.
Once you’ve picked something to install with just a bit of info and a few clicks, you’re on your way to building your site and establishing your presence as a self-publishing writer on the Internet.
Based on my recommendation of WordPress, my next post will walk you through customizing WordPress to build that virtual home people will come visit. Even though it’s going to be WordPress specific, there will probably be some information anyone can use in building their website, because some things are just commonsense.
Now for a bit of shameless promotion; a coupon code for you from DrylineHosting.com!
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