by Michael Raymond

Created on: August 02, 2010   Last Updated: November 20, 2010

As an author, your brand is you; your name.

Companies spend tremendous amounts of money building their brands. They hire marketing firms to promote them and lawyers to protect them. They buy domain names that reflect their company name and more often than not, if you type the company name followed by .com into a web browser, you end up at the company's website. You as an author can now enjoy that same advantage. How? By

registering a '.me' domain.

Ancient History

In the late 1990's, domain names were priced around $30 US per year to register. For the most part, you could get a .com, a .net, or a .org without having to try multitudinous configurations of words, acronyms and manufactured spellings to obtain a domain name close to what you had in mind to start with.

Since then, registrations have come down in price, skyrocketed in numbers to over 200 million, and the available extensions—or top level domains (TLDs)—look like the entries on a spreadsheet for year-end reporting at a major corporation.

Your Brand

You, as a writer, have a brand that requires promoting and protecting, just like any manufacturer of products. Your brand is your name and you need to guard it jealously.

As you build your audience, some of those following you are going to want to read more of your work. They may click on links in your bio or other information pages about you. Sending them to your own cleverly created domain name is good, but will they remember that name to tell their friends?

For instance, if you write articles about how businesses can use social media to promote their products and services, you might be forced to buy a domain name such as building-better-business-relationships-with-social-m edia.com, because just about anything else worthwhile or that makes sense is already taken in the .com arena. And if you use one of the automated suggestion tools you might even get the premium domain name of my-building-good-better-best-business-relationships- with-social-media-today-store.com. There's a surefire winner!

People buy from people

In most cases, we buy groceries where we can get what we want from people we don't mind doing business with. We eat at restaurants where we get good service from people. We read articles and material for pleasure from people we know and like.

A successful rock band would not normally introduce themselves with: "Hello. We're a rock band just come over from across the pond. We play some rock and roll, some R&B, a few songs for you to slow dance

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