Today we're talking about something that's been a part of my life since about 1997. Believe it or not. And that is websites.
And I'm doing the podcast on my own today because Jamie has a little bit too full of a plate. But that's okay. Because websites are my specialty, so welcome to a discussion on the value of websites for authors, and how AI is transforming website development.
This topic, besides being incredibly close to my heart, and I'll explain that in a little bit more detail in a bit, is also really important for authors. The reason why websites are so important for authors, and, in fact, any business person, is because they give you a professional presence.
They allow you to create your brand in a larger format, and especially when most of us are selling books online, or we don't have a store that is selling Mel Amade books. We just work on our own websites as our place to build brand. Even some of the other places where we often go, such as Goodreads or Amazon, don't allow you to really brand out your area. Now, on the books in Amazon, you can add your A+ content, and there's a little bit more area there for you to drive your brand forward, and of course you have your covers and your blurbs. But in general, building a website for an author means you have a professional presence. It also gives you space for credibility.
So, a well-designed website is going to attract readers. I think we all know from Kickstarter to Facebook to TikTok that readers love the vibe of a book, aka your brand. And so, the more that you can deliver on that brand promise, the better it's going to be for how readers view you and the types of books you're bringing into the world.
The website also gives you a central hub for your online activities. You might be doing a number of different types of online activities, such as blog posts, announcements for your books, upcoming events, and media appearances. When readers first discover you and your books, not only do they voraciously read your books when you've really hit the nail on the head for that reader type, but they also really want to explore who you are, what you're doing, what you've done, maybe other books that they haven't read of yours yet, maybe books that are coming out soon.
So, by having a website, you create this ambiance where you can start to build excitement around upcoming book launches and events that you're attending.
Of course, if anyone's been paying any attention to the indie market recently, you'll also know that websites give you a direct sales platform, and that way you can deliver your books directly to your audience. You can offer signed copies or exclusive content and merchandise from these shops. We're not going to cover direct sales via a webshop specifically in this podcast today, because that's a whole podcast in and of itself. There's a whole science to how you funnel people to a sales website where you're doing direct sales for your audience.
But it's really important to understand that the value of having a website is that you can also start to make more money, and you don't have to have the fees that Amazon or Kickstarter, or other areas, often put on, always put on the sales of your items.
Now, the thing that I have found the most consistently helpful about having a website is that I have used it for email list building. So, it gives you a place to capture the email addresses of your readers. If you've heard anybody talk about online marketing, you'll hear them say, "Your money is in your list." And this comes from your newsletters, your launch announcements, and then special offers that you're able to make directly to the people who cared enough about your type of books, your genre. Maybe they read your book and went to get the freebie on your website. But they've cared enough to give you their email address, and these are really warm leads.
So, in sales, they always... You know, most of... You know, I've been in marketing for my entire career, and our job is to deliver leads to sales, and the way that we measure leads, we grade them A, B, C, and D. A D lead might be somebody who visited a website. A C lead might be someone you had a conversation with at a booth. A B lead is someone who has downloaded something of yours or grabbed something of yours that was free and then given you their contact information. An A lead is someone who's purchased from you. So, if someone's bought a book, and at the back of that book they see that, "Oh, you want to follow this story on or read the side story? Go to my website and download it for free right now." And so, then they'll visit your website, they'll download your short story, and immediately you've got not just a lead, but you've got an A listed lead.
These opportunities to build your email list are super important because they're going to be the warmest people in your environment.
Now, SEO and discoverability is always key. You want to be able to make sure that you... Well, to make sure... You want to try to be as high in the search engine ranking as possible, so that when somebody... You know, the golden egg would be if somebody typed in "paranormal women's fiction" into Google, my website came up first. Now, of course, you know, PWF was started by the Fab 13 authors, and they built a website and managed to be the first on the market. So, they perform very well in the search engine ranking. So, pretty much, if you type in PWF, you will find the Fab 13 in one way or another when you go to Google.
These are the areas that are super important around SEO and discoverability of your website so that people might come across your work.
You always want to optimize your site for keywords related to your genre books. And, in fact, this is really interesting because it used to be much more important. Let me talk a little bit about website development. Some of you who have been around a while will know this. Some of you who are younger or weren't in technology very much, this might be new to you. But when I first started playing on the Internet, these were the days in 1997 when the Internet wasn't being monetized like it is today. It was being primarily used as a source for information sharing. Now, we do see those types of sites on Facebook. But back in the late nineties, it was not even realistic for most people to build a website. Those of us who wanted to build a website were writing HTML code into txt files. Then we were using another tool to upload that file into the server that was connected to the Internet. And then you would go to the Internet, open a browser, and back then it wasn't Google every day all day long. But we would go to Explorer at the time, type in the address of that server, and then, voila, the little hack HTML code that we wrote would be able to be seen by anyone around the world. It's hard to imagine how miraculous this was at the time, but I remember being quite astounded that people were keeping... You know, blogs started not then, but a while afterward. But blogs rose up because people wanted to start recording their interests and their passions and their family. And all these different things were going on. I was working on the Internet. I was working in an engineering company, and we started building out our website and improving it. But I've been at the forefront of many large companies starting to get a web presence. You wouldn't even recognize it today by how slick everything looks on the Internet, how clunky it was back in the day. But fast forward, Adobe created an amazing tool called Dreamweaver. And all of us who were building websites went out and decided, okay, we need to all learn Dreamweaver. Now, we did that for a while. There were a few other tools that came out at the time as well. And then, a little while, I'm trying to think of the exact year, I guess, and I'm guessing here, but I think it was around 2009, 2010, WordPress came along and created these templates and frameworks that allowed you to basically have a fully built website really easily.
WordPress was released in 2003, a lot earlier than I was using it. But I also remember that WordPress was like, if you had a WordPress site, it had to be like melamade.wordpress.com. So in the very beginning, it wasn't possible to have it all on your own.
WordPress made it easy for the average creative, slightly technical person to build a website. During this time in my career, I was working as a marketing consultant. I made a lot of money building WordPress websites. Nowadays, you don't have to do that. If you are not techy yourself, we've got this great new thing you might have heard of. It's called AI, and AI is changing website development again. We're seeing this new iteration where you don't even have to code. You can literally be able to say, "Hey, build me a website for a fantasy romance author." And if you've watched our webinar, you've seen this happen in purple, black, and gold, and create the graphics for it. You can literally type that in, and minutes later you can have a website built. And it's not even really minutes later; it's shockingly seconds. AI has opened up as far as websites go. I want to stay really focused on this because we know AI is changing every aspect of the world. But in terms of websites, AI is allowing you to type in a text, and it will build a website. They also use drag-and-drop builders with AI-generated templates. This, to me, is not... I mean, it's different than WordPress. But the drag-and-drop builders have been around for quite a while.
The speed that AI takes to build a website, if you have any doubt in it, again, go to our YouTube channel. It's at AI Publishing Formula on YouTube, and watch the webinar where we talk about streamlining your AI business, and you can watch me build an entire website in less than maybe a minute, maybe two minutes.
The content generation, it doesn't just build the layout. It generates the text. It doesn't just generate the text depending on the tool you use. It will also generate all of the graphics that you need for your website. So there's no more going on to Shutterstock, downloading your images, building a color palette, figuring out exactly the right colors, finding out their hex codes, laying out, you know, choosing your frame. This is how we did it in WordPress. Choose your framework, then choose your template, then bring it all together, and then nitpick the heck out of it as you're trying to get it done. You simply type in a sentence, and your website's there with all the graphics, all the text. It's incredible.
You might think, okay, but some of these tools are expensive. However, AI tools are really cost-effective. They are a fraction of the cost of hiring a web developer. When I was building websites, I wouldn't build a website for less than $10,000, and this was 15 years ago. I worked about 10 years with most of my marketing business focused around website development. These new tools, because of the ease of use, you actually don't have to hire a web developer at all. A lot of the AI web companies do monthly subscriptions. They offer some support if you need custom development. But what was happening when we were building websites, and one of the things... I'm a real project-based person, so I really like to get my hands in, get a project fixed, and get it done. What was happening with web development is that somebody would pay you a fee for custom development, but they couldn't manage the site once you finished it. So, then you have to go in and keep updating it, and they have to pay you an hourly fee to update it. Well, all of that is gone now with AI tools. You're paying a monthly subscription, and the tool is so easy to use. You can just drag and drop and type in how you want the changes to go.
Now, the last really amazing thing that AI is allowing for website development is personalization. AI can tailor the website by design and content based specifically on user preferences and behaviors. With a little bit of effort, your website can recognize an email address, come up with book recommendations, or an IP address and give dynamic content updates to that individual person. For example, let's say someone's visited my site three times. They've gone to one series all three times. The next time that they come to the site, the site will tell them, "Hey, you should read this blog. Mel's coming out with a new book in her series." These are some of the things that AI is going to allow us to do without us having to overthink it. Of course, we can insert chatbots. You can create games essentially where they talk to the characters on your website, etc. So, there's a lot of really amazing ways that AI is transforming web development and website interaction. As you guys all know, we're at the tip of the iceberg; we're just starting. So, what we're going to see AI do in web development is going to be insane. It's going to put a lot of companies on their toes in terms of development. So, who are those companies? Where are the AI website building tools that we want to talk about?
I'm going to start with one that everyone knows. Everyone who's an author presumably knows about it because I know when WordPress came out, there were a lot of authors who were finding Wix.
Wix has a tool called ADI, which is Artificial Design Intelligence. Wix has always been easy to use. It's always been a drag-and-drop option. There's no coding required, so it's very accessible for individuals who are just starting out. It does have a wide range of templates. Wix has been around for a long time, and it is very big on author portfolios and book listings. If you go there, you're going to find a level of comfort.
It does have built-in SEO tools and analytics. There shouldn't be a tool on the market that doesn't have these, but I just want to make sure that these are the things you're looking at when you're investigating the tools that you want to have inside your AI website development portfolio.
Wix also has a large community because they've been around a while. They weren't always AI, so they've been around a while. They've got great customer service.
Some of the cons: Wix ADI has limited customization options as opposed to the traditional Wix editor, so it might feel a little bit restricted for those of you who are very familiar with website development.
Like most other website tools and AI, it can become expensive when you consider the add-ons and the premium plans. For instance, if you want to add e-commerce and marketing as well. So, what we want you to do, and I think I'll work on doing sort of your checklist for a website development tool. I'll tell you which ones I'm playing with at the moment. It's not actually Wix, but I think Wix is a great choice for many people.
Some of the AI-generated designs on Wix feel a little bit generic, so they probably require a little bit more tweaking to make sure that they match your personal brand as well.
However, what you're going to get with Wix ADI is a quick setup, a professional look, and an easy opportunity to showcase your author portfolio and your book listing.
Now, I've got to confess the tool I love the most right this second, and I'm not... I'm committed to my husband, but not to which AI tool I'm going to use today, because they're all rapidly changing. But it's important that you use some of them, that you get on board and start implementing these because what you're going to see is a lot of authors are going to jump on. They're going to build their new websites, and everyone's going to start looking a lot better, a lot more slick out in the marketplace.
The tool that I'm going to talk about next, and I'm only giving three examples in this podcast, is Dora.run. That's D-O-R-A dot run. This is a tool that I showcased in our last webinar, and I just love this tool. I love it because it creates the graphics, it creates the text, and it really seems to nail the genre of what you're talking about.
So, it quickly generates these professional websites. You don't have to have a lot of input. It does have templates. So, once it comes up with what you've asked it to do, you can take all that content and replace it with a template. But it has... But I don't, because the times I've been using it, I really like what it comes up with. It does provide seamless integration with a number of platforms and tools, so you can get email marketing services and social media as well with a Dora.run website. I think these tools are really what matter. What happened when WordPress came out is like, great, I can build a website. But where's my email? Where's my marketing? Where's my social media? And of course, that's when plugins were created. So, WordPress operated on a system of plugins that would provide all of the additional tools like the SEO and the social media, and more mail lists.
Dora.run is very flexible. It does allow for personal branding and unique site features that are unique to your site. You can get in there, and without a whole lot of fuss, you can pretty quickly get it looking really outstanding for your personal brand.
One of the things I really like about Dora is that it is focused on speed and performance. I've had a couple of websites or a couple of server platforms that are like molasses, and it's painful, not just for me, but it's painful for the readers. People's attention spans are like two seconds. Hopefully, most of you are listening to this podcast at 1.5 or 2 speed, which is how I listen to my podcasts, because that's the way we take in data and information really quickly in today's society. So, I think your website, you need to really make sure that it's up to snuff in terms of speed and performance, and that will also help with not only the user experience but with SEO as well.
Dora is newer on the market. It does have fewer templates and fewer third-party integrations compared to something like Wix. Some of the features are still a little bit in development or a little less polished. But I think Dora's got legs, and I think it's going to be around a while. This support and community resources, again, as a newer platform, they're not... It's not everything Wix is on those areas. But I do feel the functionality is, for me, I've rated number one, although the next one we're going to talk about, I'm testing out a lot lately as well.
Dora is perfect for authors that just want a quick, adaptable solution that also provides these advanced AI features.
The third tool I want to talk about for website development is TypeDream. T-Y-P-E-D-R-E-A-M, one word. I know you're going to find this shocking, but it's a no-code platform. It has intuitive design capabilities that make it really simple for authors to build beautiful websites. Everyone's talking about the authors going to lose their job, or designers are going to lose their job. Honestly, when WordPress came out, I still built a lot of WordPress sites, but I thought, you know, this is so easy. Anyone could do this. When it was more working with Dreamweaver, it felt like people were hiring me for a greater skill than just building a WordPress site. Now, I think you can do away with web designers. Obviously, large companies, even some small businesses that don't have time to play around on a website, are still going to have somebody do it. But I think this is the type of tool that if you have staff, you can bring website development in-house very easily.
TypeDream has affordable pricing plans and a lot of different features. One thing I really like about TypeDream is that they have a very sophisticated email marketing tools and forms system. You can create these landing pages that are minimalist in design. It's clean. It's professional. It's modern. People will get the forms. They'll give you their email address, and then they'll get whatever it is that you're offering them for free for their email address. There is built-in SEO optimization in TypeDream. It also offers performance tracking tools, which is obviously, you know, one of the things about websites. I talk a lot about the different steps of marketing, the four steps of marketing. We identify our audience, we craft our message, we deliver our message, and then we review and iterate. When you look for a website tool, the website tool is helping you craft your message and creating a place to put your message for your readers. That fourth step in marketing, of course, by... Before you build a website, you should already know who your audience is. That fourth step in marketing, where you review and iterate, this is where on your website, you definitely want to have performance tracking tools so you can look at... You might think, oh, I need to blog every week, or I need to blog every day. If you look at your performance tracking tools, you might realize that, hey, five people come to my blog a month. So, maybe that's not the best use of my time.
Maybe you discover that a hundred people are going to the map on your website, and that might tell you that your website isn't easily navigable, and that you need to rethink that, or you need to make your map page more creative. There's a lot of really important value in making sure that you have performance tracking tools on your website.
The way we used to do this is through Google Analytics and a couple of other heat mapping tools on websites. But a lot of these AI tools have those baked into the solution. You want to look for that.
As with the other tools like Wix and Dora, TypeDream also provides integration with third-party tools. That'll always be the subset. Any company creating through third-party tools for AI web development companies will probably try to go across the board and be on every site possible.
TypeDream has the same challenges that Dora does. The features are a little more limited because it's not a very established platform. You might find it fairly restrictive if you have highly customized requirements. The template options are a little less diverse, so there's a little more manual customization. What I found when working with TypeDream is that it required a little bit more of my web skills. I had to... Because I know how to grab the container and figure out the columns and etc., it needed a little bit of that kind of love when I was laying out pages, and I didn't find that same challenge in Dora. But, you know, there's a difference. Having worked at a bunch of companies as well and helped them build their websites, a lot of companies really had us design forms that you filled in that then fed the database, that then the SQL, that then fed the website. So that's fine, but that's very constricted. If you're going to manage this yourself, pick a tool that you can easily and quickly manage. If you're not going to manage it yourself, pick a tool that you at least can go in and look at and know how your website's doing, because no one is going to manage your business as well as you do.
TypeDream is really good for authors that really like a simple and elegant site and don't want a lot of hassle and also want the built-in tools for email marketing. Those things are very clear and useful there.
So, just to recap, I want to look at what are the tips for choosing the right AI tool for building a website?
The first thing always, and I find this true in any business or marketing tool that we look at, is figure out what you need. That's a tricky question because wants are not needs. If any of you are following along on my case study, you'll know that I want to do a bunch of great things in paranormal women's fiction, and that includes having an e-commerce section of my website, having a bunch of chatbots on my website where people can talk to my characters. There are a lot of things I want to do that I don't need to do right now. When you choose, however, I'm going to add a caveat to that.
I like to look at what do I need now? So, you guys know, I need to redo my website. That's going to include the basics. I need it to have blogging. I need it to have SEO. I need it to have a newsletter. I need it to have landing pages. I need it to have tracking. Those points to me are like the basics of an author website.
In the future, I'm going to want to plug that into e-commerce, and I don't think the future is very far off for me in terms of offering direct sales on my website. So I want to make sure that whatever tool I use can either integrate an e-commerce capability, or I have to get one that's low enough priced that if I choose Shopify later, I can use both sites and connect them and pay for both sites. But that's not the discussion. That's not the choice I need to make right now. I'm going to ultimately choose one. I will announce this on YouTube and show you how I build the website. I'm going to choose one that's going to integrate e-commerce within the tool.
Because I like all of my things in one place. Nowadays, we're seeing a lot more online platforms that are providing everything you need in one place. For example, our podcast is delivered through Kajabi, which is where we also host our courses, host our blog, build our website, have our shop, etc. It's all one location.
That does bring us to the budget considerations. Obviously, you want to evaluate the cost of the tool and additional expenses. What might additional expenses be? If you do want to have custom graphics made, that could be an additional expense. If you want to have custom programming done on it, or if you think that there's some aspects of the AI tool that you don't understand, it might just mean that you need a consultation. You spend an hour with someone and talk with them about your website and the AI tool you're using. Or you might want to just service the task out to somebody else. Ultimately, the biggest budget consideration you need to make is, how much money do I want to spend every month having my AI website hosted? That's going to be all wrapped up in a bundle. Before, you would pay WordPress for the framework, you would pay for the template, you would pay somebody like GoDaddy for the server hosting, you would pay for the domain name, etc. Now, you're still going to pay for the domain name separately. But most of the hosting is all going to be wrapped up into one area, sorry, into one platform now.
The ease of use is going to depend on your technical skills. If you're highly technical and want a complex site, you can get that in AI, too, so it can just fill in some of the gaps or some of the lower-level areas that you don't want to do. But if you're pretty basic, you're going to want the most powerful AI web building tool that will give you the most bang for your sentence. So you prompt and make sure that it covers a lot of what you want.
Now, scalability is also super important. This is basically what we were talking about in the beginning, where I said, identify your needs and your wants. Take into account where you want to go with your career and with your website so that you choose a tool. Again, we're at the threshold of the AI web platforms coming out, so you might misstep. You might choose the wrong tool that you find in a year. There's another great new tool out, but it's not the end of the world. If anything, I've shared with you my trajectory through web development, and we just pivot. We just shift. We just change as each new tool comes out, and you learn a tool. One thing that you will absolutely be learning with any of these three platforms is the capabilities of an AI-developed website, and how much work you want to put into it, and how much work AI can put into it for you.
That pretty much covers what I wanted to talk about today in terms of websites. Remember, it's really important to have a website. If nothing else, it'll make you feel like an established author. When people start visiting your website and giving you their email address and downloading your books and making comments on your blog about your new book that's coming out or the new series that they can't wait for, it's going to start giving you some of that reader feedback that is so gratifying for an artist.
I think switching your website to an AI-driven website is extremely accessible. It's easy to do. It's efficient, and I would be encouraging anyone to, if you don't have time in your schedule right now to do it, put it on in the next couple of months. The capabilities you're going to get from an AI website are out of this world compared to what we're typically creating or paying somebody else to create for us.
Explore the tools I mentioned, which were Dora, Wix ADI, and TypeDream. Take a look at them. Let me know what you think. I'm totally curious into which ones you prefer, and I'd love to start seeing your websites.
