Gravatar – A Globally Recognized Avatar
One of the items in The Author Spot’s A La Carte Menu is Gravatar. If you’ve never heard of Gravatar, you’re not alone. In our experience, Gravatar is one of the most overlooked marketing tools available for authors. Once installed and configured, your Gravatar is scattered around the web pointing back to your website.
There are some readily available resources explaining the fundamentals of Gravatar, so without reinventing the wheel, let’s first look at an overview of Gravatar in this video published by its developers.
As you can see, Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar and was developed to work with WordPress, the most popular website platform used by traditional and indie authors alike.
You’ll also notice in the video, when someone hovers over your Gravitar, a pop-up window opens and displays additional info from your Gravatar profile, including links to your social media accounts and most importantly, your author website. This means that everywhere you plant a Gravatar on the web, it’s like buoy in a vast sea pointing the way to your plot of internet space. What is not obvious to the casual observer is the SEO value created by the Gravatar profile links.
Every website is crawled and indexed by search engines, Google being the granddaddy of them all. When a site is crawled, the website’s hyperlinks, including links in WordPress comments and Gravatar profile links, are collected and added to a master list of links found while indexing a domain. If you wanted to see this list, there are tools in Google Analytics that can display the indexing results, including your Gravatar links that point back to your author website.
So, without getting too far into the geek-weeds, Gravatar can help your website traffic by pointing back to your author website from every location it is planted across the Internet. The Gravatar function is especially useful for authors that actively engage in blogging and posting comments on external blogs. As an author, if your interest ends with posting to your own blog, then Gravatar will be less effective. However, if you are a motivated author-blogger, and regularly engage in discussions on other WordPress author websites as part of your marketing program, then Gravatar is a tool that will serve you well.
Question: Is Gravatar easy to setup? Ehh, it’s not hard, but it is a bit of a pain. If you are interested in trying to set it up on your own, there’s an excellent guide at https://helpdeskgeek.com/reviews/what-is-gravatar-and-why-you-should-use-it/
If you need help, The Author Spot can install your Gravatar into your author platform including a professionally designed avatar image. Reach out to us via our support app and we’ll be glad to discuss your Gravatar options with you.
And as we always say, “Go on and write, we’ll handle the tech”
‘Till next time – TJ
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TJ Culler is an author, reader, and an adventurist. She loves working at The Author Spot as an Author Platform Specialist. Her hobbies include hiking, camping, and driving her Jeep in the great outdoors. After publishing her first book in 2017, TJ discovered what a daunting task an author platform really was. She now dedicates her time to helping authors, like herself, who struggle with technology. |
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