Boss Author Page, Part Two. What’s in A Name?

This is going to be a shorter post, so I’m going to take a minute to explain to you why I’m not going to do a post about blog hosting.

I’m not doing it because I’ve only ever used WordPress. If I were to review other sites it wouldn’t be my own experience. I would only be repeating what other people said. I’m not all about that. If you want to learn about this, By Regina has a great post about it. I will tell you that I love WordPress and have never had a problem with it. There’s a reason I’ve never had experience with any other hosting site. I’ve never needed to.

Now, onto our actual topic for today. Naming your author page. I’m assuming that you don’t need a lecture about how important a solid website name is.

There is an argument for naming your page after yourself.

I wanted to talk about this first, because it’s not something I went with. I do get the logic behind this. If you are trying to promote yourself and make your name a household name than this is a decent way to go. It’s easy, too. You can also do a spin on your name, like ByRegina who you all know I love.

But I also love Lisa Jacobs from Marketing Creatively. And Kara from BohoBerry. I didn’t have any trouble learning their names.

Selecting something that matters to you.

If you want to know why I chose Paper Beats World, please go read the page I wrote above explaining why. Paper matters to me. It’s symbolic to me.

Think about what matters to you, and what matters to the message you’re trying to share. The best thing I can suggest here is to write down ten to twenty that you like and are personal for you. In fact, write down as many as you can think of. Don’t judge, just write! Then we’ll go onto step two.

Creating a unique name.

Now we’re going to judge. Go through every name on your list and Google them. Many of them will likely have similar site names somewhere. Just kind of similar is fine, but anything that’s too spot on needs to get off of your list.

Finding something that’s easy to search for.

Next, take off anything that’s longer than five syllables, can’t say in one comfortable breath or can’t write down in twenty seconds. As you start introducing people to your site you’ll be introducing it to people over and over and over. You’ll often have about thirty seconds to talk to people. Make the name fast and easy to get to people. Shorter names also make them twitter friendly.

Selecting a name that can become a brand.

Finally, take whatever’s left on your list and add Publishing to the end of it. Just in case you decide to self publish or do something further with your site. For instance, I published all of my self published books under Paper Beats World Publishing. That is my publishing company. I might do things with that beyond publishing my own books in the future. I might not! Either way, I feel comfortable branding Paper Beats World.

By now your list is probably way shorter, which is what you wanted. There’s probably a shining winner by this point, which is what you want.

If you have an author page, how did you name yours? Let us know in the comments below.