Phyllis Zimbler Miller - author guest post

I would like to welcome author Phyllis Zimbler Miller to Cafe of Dreams and thank her sincerely for taking the time to write this delightful guest post. I will be spotlighting Ms. Miller's novel, Mrs. Lieutenant within the next day or two, so please be on the lookout!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I Dreamed of a Book Author Website That I Could Completely Control

In the few months before my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT came out in April 2008 through the print-on-demand publisher BookSurge I knew that I needed a website. I wanted a dedicated online site to which to send potential readers and share information with them.

As I didn’t know how to do computer programming, I hired a web designer. And he asked me all kinds of questions, including which sites did I like that I might want my site to look like.

The truth is, I didn’t know which sites were effective marketing sites (regardless of whether they looked beautiful). I did know that I wanted a place for original 1970 army documents, a place for blurbs about organizations currently helping military personnel and their families, etc. And I wanted to be able to make some changes myself.

The site that resulted –www.MrsLieutenant.com – fulfilled my requirements, although I subsequently got very frustrated when I had to wait for the website guy to make tiny changes that weren’t covered by the content management he’d given me.

Yes, I started a blog on Blogger.com – www.MrsLieutenant.blogspot.com . And I was lucky enough to have BookSurge recommend a virtual book tour with Dorothy Thompson at www.PumpUpYourBookPromotion.com . I’m grateful for the terrific experience I had on this virtual book tour along with the introduction to book bloggers.

But then my life took a strange twist: I became obsessed with learning as much as possible about online marketing, including social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and what makes effective websites.

As I listened to every free teleseminar I could, read every free article I could, paid for e-books and social media courses, I learned that there was a book author website solution that I wish I’d had a year ago:

The internet marketing gurus recommended Wordpress.org software hosted on your own domain site rather than on the WordPress.com website. Of course, you had to know some html, etc. to use this type of software to build both a website and a blog.

I did a smart thing – I hired my younger daughter Yael, who quickly became enamored with WordPress.org software and also quickly became connected with the tech people on Twitter who answer her questions. (She tweets as @MillerMosaicLLC and I tweet as @ZimblerMiller.)

The result is that we have now started offering book authors what we have named call-to-action websites. These websites are based on the best practices of internet marketing gurus – see, for example, www.TooManyVisitorsforOneLittleHouse.com with an email option box to capture the email addresses of site visitors. And these call-to-action websites also offer the ultimate in book author websites: the ability to completely own and control your own book author website once the site is set up. No more waiting days or weeks for a web guy to make tiny changes.

If you go to our website www.MillerMosaicLLC.com you can get a free copy of “7 Tips for Creating a Call-to-Action Website” as well as links to several free book marketing articles I’ve written. I hope that, by sharing this information, I can help other book authors avoid having to reinvent the wheel.