Categories

Admit it, you’ve thought about building a business website.  You know your competition has one, but as a writer, you might have thought your words should stand out more than a flashy site.  While it’s true that you should certainly be a good writer, first impressions make all the difference right now.  In a writing market that continues to grow as people turn to freelance work to pay the bills, you need to stand out heads and tails about the rest.  And that means you need to have a website.

Where to Begin Your Website

The easiest way for you to get started with a new business website is to use a website building program.  Places like Weebly, GoDaddy, and VistaPrint all have easy to use site builders which can help you get noticed on the web.   They’re also relatively inexpensive, so this is the perfect choice for a new writer (or any self-employed person) without a lot of money to spend.  Here, you will not only be able to build a simple website, but you can set up a domain name, track your website’s success, and more.  True, these webpage builders aren’t going to let you do a lot of fancy things, but when you’re just one employee, you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles.  Well, not yet anyway.

Get Your Writing Website Started

Picking your website name is the first decision you need to make.  Ideally, it should be your business name and it should be a dedicated domain.  For example, my website is http://www.lyndaforman.com.  It’s my name, it’s short, and it’s easy to remember.  That’s what your domain should be too.  

Once you’ve chosen your domain, it’s time to figure out what kind of theme your site will have.  You need to think about the mood you want to create with your website.  It might be something like:

•    Professional
•    Quirky
•    Humorous
•    Creative

Your website needs to get across the mood of your style and of your writing expertise.  This site needs to be a sort of freestanding job interview a person can come to in order to decide whether you’re the one they want to hire.

Things to Include on Your Business Website

While it might be tempting to be as complicated as possible on your website, this is not necessarily the best way to ‘talk’ to clients.  Simple and easy is the way to be since clients don’t have time to sift through a 20 page site.  They want to know:

•    Who you are
•    What you offer
•    What your skills are
•    What you’ve written
•    How you can be contacted

In just five pages (or less), you can give a client all they need to know and all they need to make a decision about you.

How to Bring in Website Traffic

Right now, your website doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be effective.  To make sure people can find you, make sure to include as many keywords as possible on your site without seeming obvious.  Again, when you look at my website, you will see that I have different variations of writing or writer on every single page.  Why?  When a person goes to a search engine and types in writer, they’re more likely to find my site because of the keywords.

Other ways to drive people to your site include:

•    Linking to other sites
•    Linking to job websites (Guru, Elance, etc.)
•    Signing up for business advertisements which feature your website address (Yahoo, Bing, Google, Merchant Circle, etc.)
•    Link with social media (Twitter, Facebook, mySpace, etc.)
•    Include your website address on all of your email signatures, on your business card, etc.
•    Tell people about it!

The Effectiveness of a Writing Website

I’ll let you know right now how my website is doing to give you an idea of what a very basic site can do.

My website has been up and running since the end of January 2010.  In that time, I’ve had nearly 1000 visitors, with more than 2000 page views.  This isn’t as many as a brand name site, true, but it’s made me enough money to pay for the site for the next three years…all in the first 3 months it’s been up.

So, still think a business website is a bad idea?  I certainly don’t.