What domain names you will use for your webbook depends on your promotional strategy. If your book is free to all users, it’s probable that you only need one domain name and one website to promote your book. You simply carry on your promotion and direct potential users to go to your book website (webbook). The domain name is the title of the webbook. (Note that the model webbook Publishing by Voice has the domain name PublishingByVoice.com.)
Although the domain name should match the title of the book, if the domain name is taken, you might consider choosing a new title for the book. Naturally, you’ll want a .com domain name.
There’s another way to make this work. How about adding the words “the book” to the end of the domain name of your choice? Or add the word “the” to the beginning? That makes your domain name clear and memorable. And you’re likely to be able to get the domain name that you want.
Suppose you choose as the title of your book Streetcar History of Detroit. The following are domain names that you might want to use for your book website:
- StreetcarHistoryOfDetroit.com
- StreetcarHistoryOfDetroit.org
- StreetcarHistoryOfDetroit.net
- TheStreetcarHistoryOfDetroit.com
- StreetcarHistoryOfDetroitTheBook.com
Of the above names, the one most likely to be already taken is StreetcarHistoryOfDetroit.com. But if that’s taken, you have other choices, which may be almost as good. However, I would opt for a .com domain name and not use domain names with suffixes other than .com, .org, or .net.
Two or More Websites
For a marketing scheme in which you intend to sell your webbook, you may decide that it’s appropriate to have two websites. One website will be the webbook itself, and the other website will be designed to promote the book and make sales. In such a case, it makes sense to name the webbook, as I’ve outlined above. But what do you name the second (promotional sales) website?
That depends on what your strategy is. If the promotional sales website is actually a blog, you would want to use a name for the website that’s appropriate for the blog, perhaps something completely different than the first domain name (name of the book). Keep in mind, however, that if you keep the two names as close to identical as possible, your marketing strategy will likely work best.
There are no other hard fast rules regarding the domain names for a webbook or for promoting a digital book. But the guidelines mentioned above are something to carefully consider so that your potential buyers and users will have an easy time finding and remembering your URLs, and you will have better SEO.
Domain names costs about eight $9 to $18 per year on average. Thus, they are not a huge expense.
Long Tail Marketing
Some web host services provide you with multiple websites and a lot more for a small fee. Such host services are not necessarily designed for people with multiple books. They are designed for people to do what is called long tail marketing. Long tail marketers search for long search phrases to which they can attract a reasonable number of potential users with little competition from other websites. Then they get the domain names based on the long search phrases and create websites with such names. The idea is to use SEO to help attract potential buyers and do it with multiple search phrases, webpages, and websites that get a modest amount of response instead one search phrase, webpage, and website that gets a heavy response.
Such a strategy, if executed properly, can be effective. Consequently, host service providers that cater to long tail marketing provide multiple websites or even unlimited websites for a low monthly fee. Check out the following host services providers:
- HostGator (http://www.hostgator.com/web-hosting)
- Blue Host (https://www.bluehost.com)
- 1&1 (https://www.1and1.com)
The above providers have plenty of competition. You can use what the above providers offer to compare what their competitors offer. You might note many such web host service providers enable you to use WordPress as your website building software. In all likelihood, they will enable you to do an automatic installation of WordPress, too, which will save you time and effort.
Summary
For a webbook the title and domain name should be identical. Don’t compromise on this guideline. But that doesn’t mean that a webbook should have only one website. You may decide that you need another website (domain name) or more for marketing purposes.
