Is It Worth Building A Website As A Writer?
Writing is a bit of a mystical career, in that the “other people” (non-writers) don’t really know what it involves, and a lot of the time — especially when starting out — neither do we! One thing that should be common sense, though, is that in order to get readers (or clients), they need to know that you exist.
The most common way for writers to start putting themselves out there is by creating profiles on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Each of these sites have their own unique feel and function. Twitter is arguably one of the more casual environments and LinkedIn the most serious, with Facebook providing a middle ground.
Twitter makes communicating with other writers and potential readers very quick and easy to do, offering direct messaging for more private matters — DMs could be used when discussing work to be edited, for example, or to create a group chat for a collective of writers who have agreed to help each other out. Overall, Twitter provides a very interactive platform, allowing you to engage with followers and non-followers alike through the use of hashtags, polls, and other media. This is personally my preferred social networking site.
Facebook tends to be more limited in reach in that it often restricts who can view the posts that you have published on your page. It does however also allow you to post polls, photos and videos for users to interact with.
Being a career-focused networking site, LinkedIn gives you a platform on which to sleekly display a portfolio of your work, along with the positions you have held in jobs and the skills you were able to gain or use during those positions. You can add other users to your network — people you have either met or worked with, to see what opportunities they might post about, or to organise working collaboratively with them. Users can also “endorse” one another’s skills as listed on their profile. I would suggest that LinkedIn is perhaps more appropriate for someone wanting to get into publishing or a professional form of writing as opposed to creative writing.
So, what are the benefits of putting time, money and effort into building your own website? One major advantage is that a website is a platform accessible to everybody with an internet connection — not everybody is on social media, either through choice or because they are not confident in using it. Furthermore, you may only share certain things on particular social media sites, meaning with a website you can have everything you want to present in one place.
Another big reason to build you own website as a writer is that your website focuses completely on you! On social networks you can easily become lost among all the people and information, so your own website gives people interested in your work a place to go where they can’t be distracted by anything else.
You can tailor your website to have things like images, video, audio to increase engagement. This differs from what you are able to do on social networks because not all of these sites have these capabilities. Moreover, you can present media cleanly without it being thrown in among a cluttered feed or timeline. This is useful if you are, for example, a poet who wants to have a space solely dedicated to audio clips of your readings of your poems. Studies have shown that 60% of consumers enjoy reading relevant content for brands¹, so by putting out extra content readers can become more invested in your work. Another upside to having multiple pages dedicated to different aspects of your work is that you can really draw attention to each thing that you have to offer the world — on social media networks, you often have to squeeze everything into a small bio, or something like Twitters ‘Moments’ feature, which can easily be missed.
A website also acts as the home place of your brand. Your brand could be you in whatever occupation you have as a writer, or perhaps a series of books that you have written, or even one of your characters, if they have proven particularly popular.
Lastly, having your own website means you can link it with an analytics tool which can be used to track statistics such as the age, location, and gender of people interacting with your content². Analytics technologies such as Google Analytics can provide a better picture of what kind of content is working well. You might want to look at how many people have read and shared certain posts and pages, or followed a “call to action” such as purchasing one of your books or following you on your social networks. From this you can work out how to cater what you post to your audience.
Back to the question: is it worth building a website as a writer? I would say yes, if you are a bit further along in your career and are already getting significant engagements in terms of interactions on other sites, or through book sales. Whilst building a website’s layout and content takes effort, time, and money, and therefore might not be appropriate for someone who doesn’t currently have much of a profile, for an emerging or well-known writer, it allows you to have full control over the presentation of your brand. And what could be better than that?
Sources:
(1) https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic
(2) https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/features/
