When I self-published Nailbiters back in 2015, I knew I needed a website. So I bought nailbitersnovel.com which was great for that 1 book. But then I published another book. So I got 1mkwilliams.com At the time my handle across all social media was 1mkwilliams and I liked that it would match. So that is still my website domain to this day. I now have authoryourambition.com as a separate website for that brand.

So, if you get nothing else from this video, get your domain. You don’t need to be fancy and buy a domain from a domain registration site and then sign up for hosting. I get mine via WordPress which is wheer I built and host my website. The domain is $19 a year. A little over a dollar a month. Not a bad deal at all.

Link Audit – The link audit is as tedious as it sounds. I clicked every link on every page and made sure it went where it was supposed to. I found affiliate links that expired. I found a link that went off-site that could have gone internal. I found retailer websites where they changed their company name and therefore changed their website and didn’t redirect from the old domain to the new one. It was a good exercise.

G.E.O (Joanna Penn Podcast episode) https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2025/06/13/book-discoverability-in-an-age-of-ai-geo-for-authors-with-thomas-umstattd-jr/

I listened to an episode of Joanna Penn’s podcast about GEO. Generative Engine Optimization. So each tech company has its own AI, and now people are using that as a search engine. While a lot of the information on my website would still be searchable, this episode highlighted a few items I was completely missing from my website. I’m not sure how much it will help if people ask ChatGPT for a list of book recs, but it can’t hurt.

Each pen name has a page now with a bio, a headshot, and a publication list
My main navigation is Books, Subscribe, Author Your Ambition, and About. But the “Books” was just a drop-down to lots of pages. So now Books is a page.
I am also going to make an FAQ page. Right now, it will be an overall FAQ. As more titles come out for each name, I may split that off.
I will also probably reorganize the menu as more titles come out so it is by pen name.

So, lesson here: once you have your website set, you should set a reminder to re-evaluate it in 6 months or a year. The internet is always evolving and while you don’t need to do a full reorg or redesign, you should ask yourself if it istill makes sense

Upgrade to no ads – $29 (since I already paid my domain renewal for the year). The third thing I did in this link audit, was about chuck my computer because the internal pages were so slow to load. And that is bad. Most people are impatient. They will click away. And I was thinking, “Why is it so slow?” Oh yeah, I was on the free plan with WordPress which meant there were ads. Banner ads, little video ads. Not a good experience. So I looked at how much it would be to take those off. $29. For the year! So the total would be $48, but I’d already paid my domain renewal for the year so that was an easy decision to make the website better for not a lot more. And I have a year to see if that improvement will stay.

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Music from: Wondershare Filmora Sounds: “Something Cheer You Up”