3 brilliant Squarespace features you may not know about
Squarespace, let me count the ways I love thee! There are many. I’ve become a proper Squarespace nerd ever since I trained as a Squarespace designer, and what I love the most is that Squarespace are constantly evolving the platform and adding new and exciting functionality.
I’ve already blogged extensively about why I believe Squarespace is the perfect website platform for authors. But in today’s post I thought I’d go further and talk about some of the excellent features that you might not know come with your Squarespace site, and how to make the most of them.
1 Squarespace Campaigns
Squarespace has its own fantastic, built-in email marketing functionality, called Squarespace Campaigns. This means you can run your author newsletter directly through your Squarespace website!
It means no messing around with Mailchimp, or trying to integrate sign-up forms using Zapier. You collect all the email addresses directly through a Squarespace block on your site, automatically deliver sign up gifts to subscribers and then create and send your newsletters - all through the same log in you use to update your website.
Best of all, because it’s a Squarespace platform, the whole thing looks beautiful, is incredibly easy to use, is optimised from a technology point of view and you get brilliant, clear analytics, telling you which of your content your email subscribers were most interested in.
It’s all super simple and efficient, and if you’ve yet to send an author newsletter, or you’ve had enough of Mailchimp or another platform, then I highly recommend switching everything over to Squarespace Campaigns.
Find out more about why I use Squarespace Campaigns for my author newsletter here>
It’s free to send your first 3 newsletters, and then after that it’s very affordable, starting at £4 per month.
2 Squarespace Commerce
I have to credit one of my lovely website clients, Elaine Everest, for switching me onto this. Of course, I knew that you could sell things through a Squarespace website – after all plenty of small businesses and online shops use Squarespace for their websites.
However, I’d never really joined the dots before and thought about the fact that, as a writer, I have a physical product that I can sell.
My books!
Anyway, it was Elaine’s idea, as I said. As a successful saga author, she’s used to spending lots of time out and about at reader events, selling signed copies to her fans. But of course, thanks to everyone’s favourite virus, her ability to do so over the last year has been really impacted.
She sent me an email asking if it was possible to sell signed copies of her books through her website. And I had a bit of a ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ moment!
Squarespace allows you to add a shop to your website for free if you’re on their Business plan (or higher). They take a small commission on each sale, but it’s only 4%.
Best of all, it’s ridiculously easy to add a store to your Squarespace website. It only took me a couple of hours to do.
After setting up Elaine’s shop for her, I then went on to add the same function to my own author website. And, while I don’t expect to be selling loads, since launching it, I have sold more copies than I thought I would.
I’ve had several readers get in touch through social media to ask where they can get a signed copy from, and it’s been really nice to be able to say that they can go to my site and order them direct!
Plus, as I was already on the Business plan, it hasn’t cost me any extra to add the shop to my site.
3 Member Areas
This is Squarespace’s newest and most exciting feature – member areas!
Squarespace now offers you the ability to ‘gate’ content for sale, inside their new Member Areas function.
This is perfect for writers who also want to sell creative writing courses, for example, or workshops, or even podcasts. All of this extra content can be monetised, from within your Squarespace site.
I’m currently using this feature to build my ‘DIY Author Website Kit’ (which I really want to launch sometime this year – you can find out more here).
Inside the kit, there’s articles, advice, helpful downloadables and, of course, lots of how-to videos that people who’ve bought the course can access to help them build their own Squarespace website.
As with all things Squarespace (apologies for continually repeating myself here!) it’s super simple to set up and it also integrates beautifully with your email campaigns, so that you can send your customers tailored emails related to whatever content you have behind your member area.
Unfortunately, this functionality isn’t free, but at £7 per month is pretty affordable.
You can find out more about Member Areas and its potential here>
So there you have it! 3 clever things your Squarespace website can do to enhance your author career.
I hope I’ve opened your eyes a little more about the potential of your amazing Squarespace author website. As always, I love chatting about this stuff so do get in touch if you have any questions!
