Everyone knows that to have a successful website or ebook, content is king. There is no substitution for search engine ranking or customer conversion. I built my first online publishing company in 1997 (although I began writing four decades ago) and that has given me more than a dozen years’ experience with an owner’s perspective. I can write to meet the sophistication of your audience on almost any researchable topic. If fiction is your goal, I am very adept at building characters you will recognize and remember.

Order ghostwriting from The eBook Lady today!

$36.00 per thousand words

A little fiction example…

No one in town knew where he came from, and even the Reverend Smithfield, our version of the Welcome Wagon, admitted that was unusual. My neighbor, Mrs. Bumgarten, volunteered that she thought he was left behind when the circus came to town that summer—he and that odd little dog he called Sophie. Mrs. Bumgarten said the name belonged to an old-maid aunt; not to a crooked, butterscotch cur that lifted his leg on her rhododendrons and chased a ratty squirrel up the ancient oak guarding her front porch. Much of what was important in the world took place within view of Mrs. Bumgarten’s front porch.

I turned fourteen that summer. Candice, my very best friend since the sixth grade, had been invited to spend the night. We played Beatle records on my portable player, drank cold Pepsi and gossiped about boys we thought were too short and terribly silly, but possibilities all the same. About midnight we sneaked out the back door and with hysterical, whispered giggles, toilet-papered Danny Dorman’s front yard. That was the night we met McDermott, the stranger with the odd little dog.

* * *

When Candice and I had tired of waiting for Danny to discover our delicious prank, we hid in the shadows of our garage and plotted ways to steal a cigarette. Candice had seen a movie where a woman had defied a man she wasn’t in love with; shoulders shaking and eyes filled with tears, she’d been wonderfully dramatic with a cigarette tipping her long, slender fingers. Candice was easily impressed that summer, and there would be no rest until she could try a cigarette of her own.

A little non-fiction example…

Having an author website is an absolute must when it comes to marketing your book. It is your office to the world and you should take as much care in designing and writing it as you did your book.

Think of your website as your marketing assistant. It can be automated to handle inquiries, it will mail your communications, it will sort through your incoming emails, it will handle the press and it will sell your book for you. That sort of responsibility bears some careful thought about design and doing it before you begin construction will save you time and money that haste would otherwise cost you.

Picking Your Domain Name

If you’ve ever tried to buy a website domain, you may have been surprised at how few names there are available. The domain name rush that began a decade ago had investors buying up huge chunks of names for speculation purposes. This was called “squatting” and is now against the law.  You must establish that your domain is actually related to the business you conduct on that site.

Naturally, the easier a domain is to remember, the more effective it will be.  Name recall can be based on several factors; brevity, pertinence, quirkiness and most importantly, competition.  It used to be that people wanted to name their businesses to gain Yellow Pages advantage; hence the proliferation of “AAAA Accounting” or “ZZZZZ Catering.” The concept here naturally was to fall upon the first or last pages and not be caught in the obscure middle. The Internet doesn’t work that way.

Google, the world’s largest search engine grants page rank according to a number of factors and while SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a whole science unto itself, it is certainly worth doing a little search and reading on the topic, particularly if your website is meant to attract new business in addition to selling your book. Google will rank your website higher than the competition if you can demonstrate relevance to the search term. For example, if your website keywords include “free” and a search through your site proves that you have only used the word in conjunction with a cookbook that has a “salt-free” bread recipe, the search engine’s spider will not consider you very relevant and your page ranking will reflect that. On the other hand, if the keywords include “antibiotics” and you have displayed content from your book called, “The Patient’s Guide to Antibiotics” wherein the word is used heavily and with great satisfaction to the visitor, the spider will then give you credit for relevance.

So, taking this latter example, when selecting an appropriate domain name, logic would tell you to include the word “antibiotics” in the name. This is known as domain relevance.