When purchasing your first domain name, you need to look into the future and ask yourself the following questions.

What in the long term do I want for my business?

Do I need an author-focused site? The answer is yes if you plan to write many books that talk about different topics. If you want your reader to find you via search engines by your name, then an author focused site is perfect.

Are you planning to register yourself as a publishing company?  If so, you may wish to register your domain name after your registered company name since you plan to write and publish more than one book and maybe sell other related products. These other products may be online courses, memberships, webinars and other downloadable materials.

Do you need a site that is named after your book? The answer is yes if you plan to write a book series focused site, or maybe only want to promote one book.

Do you need a site that is focused on branding your name? Are you selling your name or yourself? Are you a known, or want to get known, as an authority expert? Do you speak professionally? If your book is a non-fiction one, you may need to ask yourself, ‘Are people buying this book because of my knowledge and expertise?’ If so, the readership would be searching for you on the internet using your name.

What to avoid when choosing your domain name. The name should not be too long or hard to spell where people could easily lose patience trying to find it in the search engines. If someone’s already using the .com version of your dream domain name, then consider slightly changing the name so that you can purchase a .com domain name. Otherwise you’ll end up splitting your audience between the other domain name holder and yourself.

What to consider when choosing a domain name.  Sometimes, choosing a domain name that is close in name to a popular brand, famous author, famous speaker or of a similar topic could be beneficial in the sense of every time their name is entered into the search engines your site will come up as well. This traffic sharing could be advantageous to a new or unknown author or speaker.  If you write for a specific niche you may want to include this in your domain name. For example, luvromance.com.

Finally, to avoid confusion, consider buying up all the top-level domains for your chosen domain name (.org, .net), just to make sure they don’t get bought by competitive sites.

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