Creative URLs for Your Book

When choosing a url for your book, the obvious is choice is the title and/or your name. Another good idea is a descriptive set of keywords that describes your book. A .com extension should always be your first choice at least for your primary domain name. If you are planning on advertising your book on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other pay-per-click search engines, you should consider purchasing other domain names that either describe the contents of your book or contain keyword phrases potential readers of your book might be searching under.

Why?

You only get about 25 characters (including spaces) for an ad headline and 70 characters (including spaces) for the body of the ad on Google (the others are similar). That's not a lot of room to get your message across. By using a creative domain name in the URL portion of the ad, you basically get another line of text in which to advertise your book. Remember, you can have as many domain names as you want redirect to any other domain name you want. You don't need a programmer to set this up for you.

So, let's take my book, The Fine Print of Self-Publishing. It ranks and analyzes the publishing contracts of major self-publishing companies. The main URL is www.Book-Publishers-Compared.com . Domains with hyphens are good for two reasons: (1) search engines can easily read the words when indexing your site and (2) when it appears in front of an internet surfer, it can be read quickly and easily. But, if you do this, you also want to get the same domain without hyphens (if possible). I also have www.BookPublishersCompared.com so that if I discuss my book in an interview or with someone over the phone, I don't have to say "Book hyphen Publishers....".

I also have a second domain name, www.AvoidBadPublishers.com that I use just for advertising on Google, Yahoo, etc. It redirects to the homepage of www.Book-Publishers-Compared.com . So, I have two ads running that are identical except for the URL that is displayed. I then see which one performs better. Notice how both URLs are very descriptive?

Any author who wants to talk URL strategies, feel free to contact me at mark@clickindustries.com or 612-455-2290 ext. 201.