Your Squarespace Author Blog: Top 10 Tips
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I’m no body language expert, but when I mention author blog to potential clients during our initial conversation, I see lots of rolling eyes and sagging shoulders. It saddens me that something that should be optional, enjoyable, and effective, feels like such a burden.
Today, I’m digging into a new way to think about “blogging,” together with some handy Squarespace features that can help blogging serve you, and not the other way around.
Here are my top 10 tips for a blog on your author website
Don’t call it a blog! This may seem like a strange piece of advice for me to start with, but I’ve noticed that many of my clients assume blog means you’re committing to posting every week, or at least, regularly. Instead, how would it feel to call these pages articles, and aim to publish just four or five of your best pieces? In Squarespace, your blog area can be called anything you like. Other ideas include Resources, Thought Leadership, Behind The Scenes, Bonus Material, Case Studies, Client Stories, and so on.
Bonus tip: in Squarespace, a blog is a special content type, called a Collection. The Collection concept can be used for other sets of content that are related to each other, for example podcast show notes or your writing portfolio. I love to use a Collection for anything that benefits from being categorized, sorted, or filtered.Consider hiding blog dates, so nobody knows you haven’t written something fresh in a while. If you’re not publishing frequently (or recently), there’s no need to advertise it. Squarespace makes it especially easy to hide blog dates.
Focus on evergreen topics on your author blog, to make it more likely that your undated pieces are still relevant and useful. It’s fine to share news from time to time, but think about the longevity of your articles where possible. Great news: search engines may send visitors to those pages for years to come. So if you do write anything that’s date sensitive, please make sure to include the year.
Never use your latest blog article as your website Home page. These days are over, and rightly so! At one time, it was popular for a website visitor to see your latest blog posts, front and center. Please don’t do that. Rarely is your latest blog post the best way to introduce your work, so don’t waste the opportunity to be intentional with your Home page and get better results.
You can choose whether to accept comments or not. A few blogs still do really well with reader engagement, and getting comments, but many do not. If your readers are not generally leaving comments, you can disable the option. And in Squarespace, you have additional comment options, like accepting blog comments for a certain number of days, then closing. If in doubt, I recommend you accept comments, at least to begin with, and see how it goes.
Offer an easy way for readers to share a blog post. You might not go viral with an opinion piece, but readers and fans may still like to share what they’ve read. Here’s how to add blog share buttons, in Squarespace.
If you’re also using Squarespace for your author email newsletter, sharing a blog post is beautifully easy. It’s one of the reasons I changed my mind about whether the Squarespace email campaigns tool is worth your consideration.
Bonus tip: after you’ve had a bit of practice with your Squarespace blog, consider connecting it to your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest account, to share your latest blog post automatically.Create a table of contents, if it’s a long post. Rumor has it, Google favors longer content for delivering useful value to the person searching for your topic. While I can’t confirm or deny that, it certainly makes it easier for your human visitors if you structure your long blog posts and give the reader an easy way to jump to the section they want. This is not entirely trivial to achieve in Squarespace, but it’s not hard and here are my instructions showing you how.
If you’re a nonfiction author, blogging for SEO results could be well worth your while. At the time of writing, SEO is now my biggest source of new clients. (If you arrived here through a Google search, welcome!). Search Engine Optimization is a big and complex topic, but here are my recommendations for getting started with SEO as a beginner, along with pros and cons of blogging, if you’re a consultant as well as an author.
Talk to your publisher about how much content from your book you can re-use on your author blog. Whether your blog pre-dates your book, or whether you’re strategically repurposing pieces from your book to share on your website, your publisher likely has guidelines. Indie authors have more freedom, but you still need to be intentional. The best amount of “repeated” content is definitely more than zero, but also less than a hundred percent.
And my best bonus tip: If it’s not appealing, give yourself permission not to blog! For years now, we’ve been seeing advice that “every” author should have a blog. I think that’s total rubbish, definitely outdated, and pays no attention to what kind of author you are or how you like to spend your precious book marketing time.
Related: 8 things to do instead of blogging
Conclusion
Squarespace is an excellent tool for a blog on your author website. By knowing about a few handy features, you can free yourself from the treadmill of feeling you have to produce new content all the time. Once you are able to focus on quality, not quantity, both you and your ideal reader should find it worthwhile.
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Prefer not to spend your time and energy navigating practical issues like this? As a professional specializing in strategic websites for authors and solopreneurs with books, I’m an expert in the features you need for a website that delights your audience and gets business results. If you’d like niche expertise, top quality design, and your technical headaches solved, consider hiring me.
We’ll talk about whether or not blogging is right for you during your Author Website Blueprint phase.
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