My Client Is Writing A Book About A Famous Starlet
So how do you get THE name of the Starlet? You Can’t, unless you are Bill Gates, and even then it might be unlikely. But don’t despair, you can still get a name that will work. Here’s one trick I used to get a dot com name that would be picked up by google.
I can’t use the real name of the starlet at the moment, but let’s say it’s Mary Smith. Any Domain guy will tell you forgetaboutit if you think you would like to buy MarySmith.com. My client was going to write a book about Mary Smith, so we had a couple of choices without spending a lot of money. The first obvious choice is to get one of the many Top Level Domains that are available. By the way, a lot of the TLDs are really not available for the average guy, they are owned by big corporations.
Click Here to see the ICANN list of Top Level Domains.
However, registrars have a basket of extensions you can use aside from the usual .com or .org, which might already be taken by somebody else. In my client’s case, he could have gotten something like MarySmith.US, or MarySmith.xyz, or MarySmith.world, etc. GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest domain registrars, offers over 500 extensions. These vary in price, with some having pricey renewal fees (watch out for that!), but they work because google searches will offer everything up, although you might not be really high on the list. Other factors can help you here, like having a lot of traffic to your new site, having good SEO (search engine optimization), and a lot of new material all the time.
But there’s another way that works. My client was old school and wanted a dot com. So we simply created the domain MarySmithBook.com. It could also have been MarySmithTheBook.com. Shorter is better, if available. But the point is that google will pick it up, assuming it is an active website and is properly set-up. I just checked google for my client’s site, by typing in “Mary Smith Book dot com” (substituting my client’s Starlet name for Mary Smith. The first page of google had 50 entries, including the ads, the google promos, the “did you mean…” stuff, etc. My client’s website was down the list past #30, but it was on google’s flowing first page.
So we achieved my client’s goal of getting a decent name .com for a major Starlet at a bargain hand-register price that gets decent results in the google search. The domain name tells the searcher what is important. He is looking for Mary Smith. It tells that it is a book. It will appear in the search pretty close to the top, at least not down the list around #40,000! It’s not the best solution, but it is a low-buck solution. Because most of us are not Bill Gates.
The final step for my client is when the book is published he will have to be aggressive with social media postings and publicity in order to drive traffic to his site. It’s sort of a financial inverted pyramid. The less capital you have to invest in that really great domain name, the more time you have to put into social media and publicity to balance things out.
And just in case you want to know, MarySmith.com is a landing page, quite possibly for sale at the right price, if your pockets are deep enough, and you can own the domain even if you aren’t writing a book.
