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WordPress makes blogging very easy, so much so there’s no wonder why its the platform behind 30% of the sites on the internet. From your local restaurant to the New York Times, a tremendous number of sites are built on the WordPress platform. And, chances are, your author site is built on it, too.

But, because it is so powerful and flexible, the initial the editing screen is almost entirely blank, leaving it to you to set things up to best serve the needs of your own website.

In this first part of our series on author blogging, we’ll go over how to set up your website’s editor so that you can easily see and access all of the tools you will need to craft content that can be properly shared on social media, indexed by blog posts, and organized on your website.

We’re also going to go over the additional tools/plugins you will need to install in your site to enable all of these necessary functions.

First, we start with the editor…

Setting Up Your Content Editor

With the latest update of WordPress (5.4), the editor defaults to a widescreen, full page set up, exactly like the above image. While this is a really nice looking page, and makes writing and constructing posts and pages pretty easy, it hides all of the essential stuff we’ll need to organize and market your blog posts and pages.

So, the first thing to do is get your editor ready to work.

We’ll do that by getting out of the full screen editor and activating your settings panel. I’ll walk you through that in the following screen shorts. It only takes a couple of clicks and, once you do it, your site will remember your preferences and you’ll never have to do it again.

Step 1: Open Up Your Editor Settings

You’ll see up in the top right hand corner a little three dot icon. That is the editor settings panel. Go ahead and click on that and open it up.

Step 2: Change Your Editor Settings

With the editor settings now exposed, you’ll see you have a few options here. I recommend you de-select the “Fullscreen Mode” and enable the “Top Toolbar.” Making these two changes will bring the dashboard back into view and puts the majority of the editing controls across the top of the screen in what is the closest version of the “ribbon” controls popular in MS Word and Google Docs. The result is a screen that looks like this:

If you find you prefer the Fullscreen Mode better than seeing the dashboard elements, no worries, just click on the three dots again and change your preference back. Same with the Top Toolbar option. It’s all about your personal preference. For me, personally, this set up is much more familiar and comfortable to use.

The next steps, however, are very important and I don’t recommend changing out of them.

Step 3: Activate Your Post Settings Panel

Now, turn your eyes back towards the top right corner of the page editor screen. You see that little icon that looks like a gear? Near the blue “Publish” button? Yup, that’s the one. Go ahead and click on that to activate the settings panel, which will look like this:

From now on, leave the settings panel open. That panel serves two functions: Document Settings and Block Settings.

When you are working in an individual element (ie a “block”) on the page, be it a heading, an image, a button, whatever, the settings for that block will appear along the right side of your screen in that Settings Panel.

And, when you are getting ready to publish your blog post, this panel has the necessary document level meta data you will need for your post to be effective. Things like Categories, Tags, Featured Image, and Excerpt.

Depending on your theme and plugins, there might even be other controls there like controlling the comments, social sharing buttons, and other things like that.

Adding The Extra Tools

While the WordPress editor is an impressive interface and a nice piece of code, it does lack a few things right out of the box that are important for ensuring your posts and pages are properly indexed for search and formatted for social.

To get these very deisrable extras, you will have to add in and activate some plugins.

Plugins are small programs that you can add to your website that provide extra functionality. If your website were a house, plugins will be all of the appliances. Sure, you don’t have to have things like a refrigerator, oven, dishwasher and coffee maker to live, but they sure do make living a lot easier. This is the same concept.

At ModFarm we provide the premium versions of these plugins to our clients, but if you’re on a budget you might be able to work with the free versions if you’re willing to sacrifice a few bells and whistles.

I’m not going to go through how to install plugins here, but if you go to this link you can get directions straight from WordPress itself.

Plugins We Recommend

We’re looking at plugins that will help you tailor your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), specify your social media meta-data, assign images, and speed delivery. Here is what we recommend you install (you only need one for each category):

SEO: SmartCrawl Pro by WPMU or Yoast SEO

Social Media Metadata: SmartCrawl by WPMU or Yoast SEO

Social Sharing: AddtoAny, Hustle by WPMU

Speed Enhancements: Smush Pro, Hummingbird Pro, WP Total Cache

Slide-Ins/Pop-Outs: Hustle by WPMU, Thrive Leads, Bloom

You will also need a newsletter system to fully utilize our method. You can use something inside of your site, like MailPoet or Newsletter, or external like MailChimp, Mailerlite, or something similar. Whichever you choose, the important thing is that it has the ability to send emails based on RSS.

ModFarm clients have the option to use our in-house email system that interfaces directly with their website, making a bunch of things we’ll be doing just a little bit easier.

Summary

With these few additional plugins and simple changes to your editing screen, you can unlock a lot more capability for writing and organizing your blog posts.

In the next part of this series on author blogging, we’ll dive into how to use WordPress’ powerful block editor, Gutenberg, to place your blog posts 4 essential elements.

Whenever I’m talking with authors about websites and how to use them, the question of whether to share the link to the book on their site or to the book on Amazon almost always comes up.

The reality is these sites have fairly similar purposes, but the philosophy behind them is very different. And that difference is very important to understand.

For the author, their site is to inform the reader about their book(s) and then direct them to a sale. Amazon is just there to sell books – not necessarily yours.

Using a ModFarm Book Page as an example (The Long Sword by Christian Cameron), here are the explicit differences between an author’s website and Amazon, screen-by-screen.

Right off the bat, you can see a pretty severe difference between what each site is trying to accomplish.

The Author Website’s goal is to inform a potential reader about the book in order to convince them to buy it. Amazon’s goal is to process a sale for a customer who has already decided to buy.

Amazon is not trying to convince a reader to buy a book, it is there to process the transaction. You can see this from how little information about the book is presented. Amazon uses more screen real estate to serve two banner ads – neither for one of the author’s books – than to describe the book that is central to the page.

Once you scroll down a bit from that initial landing screen, the difference between the two philosophies becomes starkly apparent.

The author’s book page presents actions. The reader has had a chance to see what the book is about and now options are presented: Buy Now, Read A Sample, Add To Goodreads, or See The Full Series. Not to mention the audiobook and links to buy it, which, being icons, also serves to let the reader know where they can buy it in the future.

Amazon, on the other hand, has written off the purchase and moved on to other alternatives, serving the customer with an entire screen of other books to choose from. Remember, Amazon’s goal is to sell A book, not YOUR book specifically.

If the potential reader didn’t take the bait on the first screen, then Amazon’s assumption is they are looking for a book but weren’t satisfied with the first offering.

The third screen brings things back into more alignment between the two, but for entirely different reasons.

For the author website, this screen starts bringing social proof into the equation as a means to bolster confidence in the book and get the potential reader to reconsider the book and get back on the “Buy Now” track.

For Amazon it is a way to present what they consider low level information. This page is the “publisher” space and gives some room for the publisher to make their pitch, which is commonly a string of reviews. But, remember, this screen comes after the one prior – the one full of alternative books.

Amazon’s concept for this screen is similar to that of the author website’s, which is that the reader didn’t buy the book, but passed on other options, so they must be looking for more information. And so they give the publisher (or author, if self published) a space to make their pitch to try and get a sale.

Screen four is where both sides give up, quite frankly.

The author site shows the reader some of the other books by the author that might interest them, in this case a randomized sampling of the author’s catalog from that same genre (historical fiction).

Amazon presents a large banner ad. It has decided that if the reader hasn’t selected and bought a book by now, its not really that interested in buying a book today so why not try something else.

The last screen in both cases is for linked content from a previous screen.

For the author website, this is where the buy links, connected to the big red “Buy Now” button at the top, are placed. This area of the book page provides enough screen area to hold all of the myriad options of buying a “wide” book, both in terms of the various retailers, but also formats (ebook, audiobook, and hardcopy).

Amazon uses this area to house reviews, connected to the star rating at the very top of their first screen.

“Which Do I Share?”

All things being equal, authors should share the link to the book on their website over sharing the link to Amazon.

A well crafted book page on an author website performs better than an Amazon page in terms of clicks. With ModFarm sites, even our worst performing book page converts at the same rate of an Amazon page (about 16%), but some pages work considerably better (our highest performer is currently at 42%).

If the book is a wide release, sharing to the book page on your website provides the various purchase options that Amazon is not going to provide.

For authors with wide books, having the various purchase options well presented and available on their website makes a big difference in sales. Examining ModFarm author site clicks over the past three months, the cumulative clicks to other retailers adds up to the same number of sales directed to Amazon. In effect, directing readers to their book page instead of to Amazon can potentially double a wide author’s earnings.

The caveat here is “all things being equal” and the reality is that many author websites do not have book pages that are designed to sell books. A surprising number don’t have book pages on their websites at all. If that is the case, then there is little other option than to share the link directly to the retailer.

Some Extra Tools

If the author website has the ability to tailor how its content shows on search engines and social media, then authors can make their website links more of a sales tool by customizing the display image and text, something that can’t be done with links from Amazon or other retailers. Here’s an example of that from Scott Moon’s Shortyverse series page, recently shared on Twitter:

In addition, when more readers are directed to an author’s website, they get exposed to the amount of information on that site. If the site is well constructed and has a lot of information they want (largely book information), then they view the site as a resource, checking it more often for updates, increasing the site’s SEO, and reducing the need for advertising over time.

In Summary

An Amazon page is most effective when the people visiting it have already decided to buy. An author website’s book page, if well made, is better at convincing undecided people to buy a book than an Amazon page is.

This is due primarily to the difference in philosophy. An author site wants to sell a specific book, Amazon just wants to sell a book and if the reader passes on the first option, its algorithm quickly offers another twenty similar options.

If a book is a wide release, sharing a dedicated book page from an author website that contains the various purchase links is the best choice by far. A distant second is something like a Books2Read page, that has the purchase options but not the sales architecture.

If an author’s website does not contain a dedicated book page, then sharing directly to a retailer, be it Amazon or any other, is the only remaining option.

Its a pretty common scenario. You are an author looking to increase your sales and you start talking with other authors on how to go about doing that. They all say “get a newsletter” and they recommend services like MailChimp or MailerLite.

So you head over to their website, see that there’s a free tier, and you sign up and get going.

During that sign up process, your newsletter of choice hits you up with the fantastic offer of a free landing page that you can build yourself with a simple drag and drop system. You, not being a great web designer, say “sounds great!’ and build that puppy right up. They give you an indecipherable link like eeepurl438.com and you move along full speed ahead.

In the next two weeks you update all of your book’s back matter to direct new readers to that absolutely awesome landing page. You share that link to your friends. Things are happening, sign ups are moving.

Then, after a couple of months, the free tier runs out.

But, that’s a good thing, right? You’ve got signups!

However, now that it’s your money on the line, you pay attention to that balance sheet and start shopping around for other services. Because while you are right on the 20booksto50k path, you’re still not in the realm of full time, 6-figure author happiness and each dollar still matters.

Then, your search pays off and you find a cheaper plan! Sweet!

Where you got that cheaper plan doesn’t matter, because they gave you a different link.

You’re not eeepurl438.com any more. Now your eeepurl794.com.

It’s not the same as your old link. Oh, f#%&.

The link you’ve embedded in all of your books (11 and counting with a new one that just got formatted) will no longer work. You’ll have to swap all of that back matter to get the new, reduced pricing.

Quickly, you do a double check and decide that changing all of those links just isn’t worth the cash you’re going to save on the new, cheaper plan.

Maybe that landing page was a bigger decision than you thought.

Maybe there was a better way to go about setting that up.

Maybe… It was a trap.

Claim Your Power!

The landing page, the website, the whole deal – those are traps that newsletter providers have built up to make moving away from their system as difficult and costly as possible. They want that change threshold to be maxxed out as high as they can get it. Because that is what prevents you from leaving and keeps you in their system forever.

Never take the landing page option!

And definitely never – ever! – take their “website” option…

The best thing to do is to build a dedicated page on your own website – call it “newsletter” or “readers club” or “VIP” – doesn’t matter what you call it for now. What’s important is that it is a) on your website and b) it’s own page. That means it has a URL that looks like this: mydomain.com/newsletter

Why is that so important? Because YOU own that! That is YOURS. You will never have to change that link, ever. It’s all yours and it is as permanent as you want it to be.

If you are a decent hand at tech, go ahead and make a custom form that connects to your newsletter system of choice. There are several plugins that provide that kind of functionality (we like Gravity Forms, Hustle, and SeedProd Pro, but there are other options out there). Once that’s done, you’re all set – for life!

Not very technically savvy? Hey, it’s OK, no shame. Take the “embed” option.

When you are setting up your newsletter service, your newsletter provider will offer you a snippet of code that contains your sign up form. Copy that code and paste it into the dedicated page you just made on your website.

And now you have an email newsletter signup form that empowers you instead of traps you.

Want to change newsletter providers in the future? No problem!

With the link to your newsletter on something permanent that you own, shop around and switch providers with full confidence. When you find a new provider with a plan you like, just erase the old embed code and replace it with the new one.

Easy peasy.

Changing that code snippet or swapping that form integration can mean a huge savings over time, and no need to reformat books, change ads, or try and redirect traffic to a new link. When you control the page, the link never changes.

By using your own website the power stays in your hands. If you ever get a new website, switch website providers, or anything else, don’t worry – that page structure is universal. It will always be yours and you will never have to change your newsletter link address again.

Your website is the only thing on the web you actually own. Not social media, not advertising, and not anything else anyone ever gives you.

Use that asset to keep control of both your online presence and your online marketing.

Good luck out there.