5 Ways For Authors To Use The Announcement Bar
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Need a way to draw extra attention to something on your website? Or one of your books?
Squarespace has you covered with a built-in feature called the ‘Announcement Bar’ that is perfect for this.
The announcement bar is a solid coloured strip across the top of your website. It shows on every page of your website and includes a clickable link so that you can direct your website visitors directly to whatever you're promoting.
It's also easy for website visitors to get rid of it if the offer isn't relevant for them. Making it the perfect non-intrusive way to promote, highlight or announce any news you need to.
Here's what it looks like on my website:
How To Enable It On Your Website (Squarespace 7.1)
From the main navigation menu in the backend of your Squarespace account choose 'Marketing' > Announcement Bar > Enable Announcement Bar
From here you can adjust the written text on the bar and the clickable link. However, you can only use this feature on a business plan or higher. It's not available on the personal plan.
To Change The Colour of the Announcement Bar (Squarespace 7.1)
Once you've enabled the announcement bar and saved it, head back out to the main navigation.
From there choose Design > Site Styles > Colours
Choose the colour theme you've set for your navigation menu & click into it to edit
Then to find the setting for the announcement banner, click on the banner in the design window and it should automatically take you to where you can edit the background colour and text colour of the announcement bar.
Make sure to save any changes and then you're done.
5 Ways To Use The Announcement Bar As An Author
1 | PROMOTE NEW RELEASES
Just released a new book? Use the announcement bar to highlight the latest release and direct your readers straight to the relevant page for that book when they get to your website. Make sure to include all relevant buy links to make it easy for them to purchase.
2 | PROMOTE YOUR NEWSLETTER
If you don't have any current promos or new releases then using the announcement bar to direct readers to a newsletter signup page is a great way to promote your email list. If you do this, I highly suggest that you offer something free in exchange for their email address. Perhaps a free book, novella, chapter etc. Most people don't want to sign up for an email list anymore without getting something in return. So make sure whatever you offer is relevant and enticing to your readers.
3 | PROMOTE ANY CURRENT SALES
Use the announcement bar to let readers know of any current sales going on for your books. You can either direct them straight to the individual book page on your website, or if you have more than one book on sale at the same time, I would suggest creating a quick page with all of the available offers on it. In Squarespace you can easily create a new page, and add the book cover photos plus the sale links.
4 | PROMOTE YOUR FREE BOOKS
If you have free books, either permafree or free for a limited time, then you should highlight this via the announcement bar. Readers love to get free things, especially if they're a new to you reader. This way they get to test out a book and see if they like your writing style before purchasing more. The easiest way to showcase these is if you group all of these freebies onto one page on your website, then you can use the announcement bar to link to it.
5 | PROMOTE YOUR 1ST IN SERIES
Just like promoting your free books, you can use the announcement bar to showcase all your first in series books. Add each of your first in series to a single page on your website, add the book covers, blurb and buy links, then link that page to your announcement bar and grab website visitors attention with a compelling hook to get them to click eg. "Ready to start a new series? Click here to find your next read".
These are just some of the ways you can use this built in feature of Squarespace's to highlight your books and offers as an author.
Which one are you going to try first?
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