Increasing visitor engagement to your website

Hello, everybody! It’s #WebsiteWednesday! Here are some tips for increasing visitor engagement to your website.

Ok, so you have traffic coming to your author site, so how do you get your audience to interact with you and what will make them want to come back for more?

Involving your audience is always a great way to get repeat visitors to your web page. Monthly contests or games are an excellent way in which you can do this.

For example, you can have a competition each month for visitors to share a post or a tweet for a chance at a prize (an e-book, a paperback, swag, an exclusive excerpt)

You could have a guessing game where your visitors try to guess your favorite celebrity or your inspiration for a character, your favorite musician, etc. It gives the visitor something to do and helps them get to know you at the same time.

How about a monthly poll? Getting feedback from visitors is an important part of marketing. Use the poll to find out what they like the best about your book. Who is their favorite character or villain? What do they want to see next? Or to get demographics like: What part of the world are they from? What genres do they generally read the most? What tropes do they enjoy? All of this information can be gotten quickly and compiled later to help you promote your books in the best way possible to a target audience.
Alright, now that we have the fun and games out the way, what else can you do to engage your visitors?

Content is KING. Make sure your website has plenty of content that is regularly updated and is easy to access from any device or location. Do a weekly blog, or even a bi-weekly blog. Taking the time to pen a few words other than the ones inside your novel is not a crime. Update your readers on what is going on in your life, what events you’ll be attending, what travel plans you might have or a funny story about your family or even something that happened during the writing process. People come to your website to find out more about you and what you are writing. The same old tired content will discourage them from checking back regularly and could lead to them forgetting you altogether.

If you feel comfortable in front of a camera record a video for them about writing or your books. Give them a glimpse into the process. Mention any upcoming events or releases. Do cover reveals or brief WIP readings that will make them feel like they are a part of the publishing and writing process. Ask for their comments and critiques.

Create a music playlist that your fans can listen to while they read your books. This helps them crawl into your mind and visualize the world you have built with the music that brought it to life in the first place. This helps people see your vision of scenes and who doesn’t love discovering new music?

If you have the talent and time, you can even do things like hiding “easter eggs” on your site that open up exclusive content or prizes on your site. You can hide these in text or in graphics around your site, and it will keep the visitor looking through every page looking for more.