Friday, November 13, 2009

Reviewer's Tip - Website Links

Today's tip is really a marketing tip, not a book design, writing, or other related tip to make your book shine.  If you have a website for your book (and if you don't - WHY NOT???!!!), be sure all the links on that site work.  When you first set up your site you'll check and re-check the links.  But over time, the urls (Uniform Resource Locator - the site's address) may change, may move, or may actually cease to exist.  Every month, it's a great idea to go through your site and check all the links - both links within your site and links to other sites.  There is nothing worse than having a customer come to your site and clicking on a link that doesn't work.  It could lose you a sale.  So keep your readers/customers happy to make sure your links ALWAYS work!


Another suggestion - to keep readers at your site - is to insert a code into the html of each link so that the new page opens as a separate/new page rather than go from your page to the new link's page.  To explain another way, when a customer clicks on a link that goes to another site, does your site stay up in the background?  It should!  That way, when the customer closes the other site's page, or moves on, your site will still be there.  The html code looks like this:


great site.com


target="_blank"  is the extra little code that tells the browser to open a new window.  To see an example of this, go to our Feathered Quill Book Reviews site, and click on the "Free Book" icon in the left-hand column.  You'll note that the Free Book page comes up in a new window.  The original page is still there in the background.  This is a great little trick to keep customers coming back to your site.

No comments:

Post a Comment