Creating Financially Friendly Websites for Authors

When I started writing I was advised that a website was a necessity for any novelist. New to the business of writing, I knew nothing of domains, web hosting, platforms, blogs and social media. As many other new authors do, I registered my domain name (www.LisaPietsch.com) with www.GoDaddy.com. I knew nothing about designing a website so I purchased a WebSite Tonight package with hosting from www.Godaddy.com as well. Several hundred dollars later and without the help of a single royalty payment, I had a mediocre website. Hopefully you can learn from my experience and increase your profit margin by decreasing your author website expenses.

The first thing you need to do is register your domain. (Your web address. Example: mine is www.LisaPietsch.com.) This is easily done through GoDaddy.com and will cost you the same amount of money no matter where you go. Once you register your domain you'll want to be sure to keep it current by renewing it every year. GoDaddy.com will send you reminders so you won't miss the deadline or you can take the automatic renewal option. This is particularly important because if you ever lose your domain name, it may be difficult to redirect your readers somewhere else.

Now that you have an address (domain) you'll need to set up housekeeping. This means setting up a website and finding somebody to host it. Think of your website as an office and the hosting company as the building it is in.

If you aren't a web designer and can't afford to pay for the services of one, which few starting writers can, I suggest using a platform that is easy for you to update and your readers to navigate. You can pay about $90 a year for a GoDaddy.com hosted Website Tonight account that will provide you with a basic, static site that is time consuming to update. This allows you to do all your shopping in one stop but that is an expensive way to do business. The best way I've found is to build a Wordpress website absolutely free at www.Wordpress.com. They'll even host your domain for under $10 per year.

I didn't know any better and bought the whole package at GoDaddy.com when I first got started. My advice to anyone getting a writing career started is to start your website at Wordpress.com for free. You can build your site using one of their many themes and everything is user friendly and self explanatory. The learning curve is minimal. I started mine at www.LisaMPietsch.wordpress.com. Once I had my site set up the way I wanted it at Wordpress, I moved my hosting from GoDaddy.com to Wordpress.com. I went from paying $90 a year for hosting to $10 a year. It was shockingly easy and took about twenty minutes all totaled. This had a significant impact on my profit margin as well as my number of visitors and it can do the same for you.

Here's how to get started:

• Go to Wordpress and claim your site: http://wordpress.com/

• Build your site or wait for my Wordpress Tutorial coming soon.

• Go to GoDaddy and register your domain: http://www.godaddy.com/

• Set up your domain hosting at Wordpress

• Blog regularly and search engines will find you

As new authors hoping to sell a book, we're told we need a website before an agent or publisher will take us seriously. Too many of us fall into the www money pit long before we ever make a sale. Take it from someone who learned the hard way - this is the way to a professional and inexpensive web presence.