Continuing on with the “your name” domain author website must-have…
As I pointed out in the previous post of this series, there are some real benefits to having a domain name with your name in it, like my eldonsarte.com. Ideally, and in my opinion the best option for author purposes, is to have:
- a .com domain
- a domain made up of your author name, nothing more
Again, like my eldonsarte.com. I say “author name” because even if my real name were Percy, say, the name I use in my books is “Eldon Sarte,” so in all likelihood, if anyone’s interested in digging up more info on those books and/or the author of those books, she won’t be searching for Percy. If you use initials, that’s what you’ll want to use (jkrowling.com). If you use a middle name, have it in there (such as Peeps author Elizabeth Spann Craig’s elizabethspanncraig.com). And so on.
Problem is, your .com may no longer be available. The more “normal” and “common” your name, the more likely that this is the case. If you find yourself in this situation, let’s go through some of your options and alternatives.
Try to buy your author name .com from its current owner. Type the domain into your Web browser and see if it leads anywhere with contact info. If that doesn’t pan out, try looking up the domain’s WHOIS record, which should give you a few email addresses (try the Registrant email; if that’s not provided, the Admin email). It’s unlikely that a current owner will be willing to sell, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, you never know. Even if you do find someone willing to sell, it probably won’t be cheap, especially if the owner’s a domain investor doing nothing with the name, just sitting on it waiting for someone to pop up who wants to buy it (not at all unusual for common and famous names). Everyone’s got their price, but for any author site, I’d personally move on to one of the alternatives below instead of spending a mint for the author name .com, but that’s me.
Add a descriptive related keyword to the domain name. Keywords like author, or writer or books or somesuch — eldonsarteauthor.com and eldonsartebooks.com, for example. Even better if it’s a keyword that has a high likelihood of being used along with your name in a search query, like me adding “author” on searches for names I know are fairly common. No reason why they couldn’t go at the front of the name either, if the resulting domain name rolls off your tongue better that way (authoreldonsarte.com). Well, now that I think about it, I prefer them at the end, but that’s just a personal preference — do what you want!
Forget a .com; choose a different TLD for your domain. A TLD, or top-level domain, is that small group of letters at the very end of the domain name, after the dot. The most popular is .com, of course, followed by .org and .net. But you may have noticed a whole bunch of new ones popping up recently, such as .co, .info, .me, .biz, .us, .ws and so on (eldonsarte.me). They keep adding to that list, too. The important thing is that I’ve found they work just as well as .com domains with search engine results, as I described in the previous post. I’m not fond of them, as of now and in the foreseeable future they aren’t as good as a .com (or even a .org or .net), but they work for author website purposes. People are starting to get used to seeing them too, now. Worth considering.
What to avoid. If you’re really set on getting a .com, there are a few more alternatives besides the keyword thing I mentioned above. But I don’t really recommend them. I’ll mention them here and share some thoughts about them, however, just in case they appeal to you for whatever reason.
The first is using hyphens (eldon-sarte.com). They’re effective with search engine results as well, so if that’s all you want a domain for, there you go. They are, however, a real pain to verbalize, such as over the phone when talking to a reporter, which often translates to “increases the chances of something going wrong.” Can you imagine the incredible missed opp when you finally get some press coverage and they get your domain wrong? And if you think there’s little chance of that happening, good luck to you!
The other common alternative for authors is to come up with some creative or clever domain moniker, probably related to the books you write or your main genre, or something writing-related, or just about anything but your author name, even if the site is pretty much all about you and your writing. That kind of domain name could work — it has worked — but it does negate the search engine benefits of having your name in the domain itself. Makes it more than just a tad more difficult to get some kind of automated benefits from the search engines as I’ve described, in any case. Just something to think about if this domain naming technique appeals to you (and believe me, I know how you feel!).
Well, that’s enough food for thought on picking a good workhorse domain name for your author website. Let’s see if I can wrap this topic up by answering another common question:
Where should you buy your domain?
“Register” is actually the technically correct term, and the service you’re looking for is a domain name registrar, since you’re not buying a domain outright — you’re registering and paying for the right to use a domain name for a period of time.
So, which one to use? The good news is that there’s a bunch of them out there to choose from. The bad news is… there’s a bunch of them out there to choose from.
Since it’s earliest days years ago, I’ve been a customer of GoDaddy. Not the cheapest (although it was back when it first started), but pricing is reasonable, and frankly, I haven’t paid a full GoDaddy registration fee in years, new or renewals. There always seems to be coupon codes floating around that’ll give you considerable discounts on their fees (that’s a tip!) and a neverending supply of offers on top of that. Such as this one, my own affiliate link that, as of this writing, lets new customers register a domain for one year for only $2.95:
One thing about GoDaddy though: They try to upsell you on anything and everything they’ve got. They’ll even phone you occasionally. Doesn’t work with me — I know their M.O. and use them for nothing more than domain name registrations, and for that, their main line of work, they’ve got all their ducks in a row. They will try to seduce you with really low prices on all their other stuff, especially for their budget Web hosting (meh). Hey, do what you want, but again, besides domain names, I generally ignore everything else they try to pitch me.
Well, there is one additional GoDaddy service authors may want to consider: Domains by Proxy privacy. The contact info you provide when you register your domain — which likely will be your home address, phone and email — is publicly accessible and visible to all comers through your domain’s WHOIS record, and this isn’t GoDaddy’s fault. Their Domains by Proxy service privatizes all that contact info, all of it, behind their layer of contact mechanisms, for a small reasonable annual fee per domain. Definitely an add-on you should consider.
Another domain name registrar I personally have no experience with whatsoever but many of my friends seem to use is Namecheap.com. Pretty self-explanatory what their appeal is; they have, however, been around for a long time and again, many pals swear by them, so worth a look.
These two are far from the only game in town! So shop around if you’re so inclined. Just FYI, a .com 1-year registration is in the $10-15/year regular price ballpark, plus a tiny ICANN fee (it’s the domain name governing body); anything that deviates wildly from that ballpark, something smells. Any other fees beyond what I’ve mentioned, something smells even more. Although we’re not talking about a lot of money here, you do not want your one-of-a-kind domain all tangled up with some questionable operation just to save what, a couple bucks or so a year?
That about covers domain names for author websites. Onwards…
Article by Eldon Sarte
