by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
When I first started my writing business back in the dark ages, 1997, I tried to get the domain for my name. Taken. Seems my name is quite common and a photographer in Denver already had the domain. Curses. So I named my business Warrior Tales and went about my business life.
About five years ago at the Willamette Writer’s Conference, a speaker suggested aspiring writers keep checking for their name domain. So ten years after the fact I checked and it was available. I snapped it up so fast my URL registrar www.dynadot.com almost caught fire. So www.kimberlyacook.com was mine. Joy in Whoville!
But how did I settle on using my name in its current configuration? Simple. I went to Amazon.com and checked to see how many Kim Cook authors there were. Plenty. That was my byline with the newspaper, but too many folks thought it was a great name for little girls. How about Kimberly Cook? Still a ton. Kimberly A. Cook took the numbers down to a manageable few. That is the exhaustive marketing research I did to figure out what form of my name to use for my first book and career.
Flash forward to establishing my blog. Since my company name is now considered an “aged domain,” which means its been online so long it holds first place in Google searches. Who knew I’d be rewarded for staying on course like the ol’ tortoise I am. I decided to use my name as the blog domain to increase my author awareness, I write fiction in addition to non-fiction, and I still need to separate myself from the gigantic “kim cook pack.”
According to Google, a ton of Kimberly Cooks are high-powered divorce attorneys across the nation, except for me. When one query told me there were 3,350 Kimberly Cooks on Facebook, I knew I needed to build up my name marketing strategy. Started my blog this past Fall using WordPress and I redirect my name domain to my blog. Truth in advertising: Okay, I did that after three months of trying to get the blog imported to my web site and having numerous nervous breakdowns. I will be hiring tech elves to figure that out. It would’ve been easier for me to launch the space shuttle. If it was still flying…..
But a funny thing happened on my way to marketing savvy. I like to do exhaustive research about my online profile to test how things are going; I Google myself, with and without quote marks. When I started the blog my name/blog pages came up on page 4 of the Google pages. Part of this is due to the fact my name has been on my web site for eons and I’ve Tweeted for more than a year, so I wasn’t in the weeds on the search page ranking. Checked back three months later and I am on page one.
How in the heck did that happen? Great news, but how? First I had added my blog posts to my Amazon.com author page and Amazon is the big online gorilla on the block. But I accidently did something else right. I think.
When I was reading about blogging, one person noted it was a good idea to put your byline on each blog post in case someone shared it. Some folks wanted to know who had written a shared post and couldn’t easily figure it out. Since I always had a byline when writing for the newspaper, figured it was the right thing to do. Here’s the dumb luck part; it didn’t dawn on me that everytime I post my name is right there in my byline being scanned by the Google spiders. Duh?
I like to think my experience gives authors hope about social media. If you make a plan and just keep at it, it pays off. The old adage about “just show up.” I Tweet three times a week all at once and I blog twice a week. That’s it! Just like writing, you have to persevere and keep at it. You too could be an aged domain! Woo Hoo! Or maybe fly a new space shuttle. I’ve always loved the movie Space Camp……
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