I love this video from Ted.com starring Daniel Pink, titled “The Surprising Science of Motivation”. This has made me re-think the way I motivate myself to write a certain amount each day. In addition, his illustration of “The Candle Problem” has many applications, and I’m sure you’ll see yourself in at least part of this video.

Here’s a post I’ve been promising for a while now: how to choose a domain name for your book, ebook, or for that matter, any other project.

The first rule: I could never, ever endorse titling a book (or any other project) if you do not own the associated .com domain. If the title of your book is Be A Smarty Pants, then you must own Beasmartypants.com. This means that you may also own all the other domain extensions with the exact title of your book, including .org, .net, etc., but just be sure that you own the exact title in .com form.

When brainstorming about the title of a book with a client, I always have a browser window open to my web host, and we check the availability of the domain first. If the .com isn’t available, we look for something else to title the entire project. Other extensions like .org or .info do not cut it. People simply have a tougher time remembering domain extensions other than .com – the ideal would be to buy all the domains you choose in all the available domain extensions, if only to prevent someone else from buying them and using them, which can cause confusion for your clients.

The primary objective in choosing a domain name is to make sure that people will have it on the tip of their tongue when they need your book, product or service. It must have sticking power.

Imagine that you are at lunch with a friend, and she tells you that she’s selling her home, and that she found a great new realtor on the web. You’ve also been thinking of listing your own home, and you ask for the realtor’s domain name. You are too busy eating to write it down, and when you get home later, you try to remember the domain name. Unless you are good friends with the person, you won’t bother to call them or email to ask for the  URL. You will instead bypass that great realtor and start hitting Google. The realtor just lost a listing.

No-no’s for choosing domain names;

- Inclusion of the words “my” and “your”, nor “blog” nor “website”, because they get caught in spam filters.

- Inclusion of “4″ nor “for”, nor “2″ nor “to(o)” because when said out loud, they get confused with the number vs. the spelled word

- Words that are normally contracted, such as I’m or it’s.

- Any country (.ca, or .au) or other suffix: it should be a true “.com” for at least the main domain, because nobody remembers anything else.

- Plus, .info only works if that’s really what you’re offering: nothing but information.

- No dashes or underscores.

- No abbreviations of any kind, not just the conventional ones as per above.

- No strange spellings that require a long-winded explanation. Remember your elevator speech.

- No half-words, such as “comp” for company or “int” for international.

- Do not use your own name unless you’re trying to brand yourself, such as in the case of an Author or speaker.

Instead, your domain name should:

Be benefit-based rather than feature-based.
This can be tough to discern when you’re very close to your project, but this goes back to basic marketing training. For example, to market my podcasting services, I use the domain ResultCast.com (coming Sept. 09) and direct it to a specific landing page designed to just sell that service. Of course I provide quality recording, editing, and so on, but what people really care about is that it gets results. Think about great domain names like SpaFinder.com, AutoTrader.com, and FreeConferenceCall.com.

Tell people instantly what you’re selling.
I’m so lazy that I can’t be bothered to explain too much, so I’d prefer to let the domain name explain as much as possible, or at least put people in the mood to hear my super-short explanation. Clearly, FreeConferenceCall.com does the best job of this in the above list, but they all do fairly well.

Be easy to say and spell.
If people have to ask you to repeat it, drop it and move onto the next one.

Appeal to mutiple generations.
Unless your market is very clearly defined by age, your Grandma should get it as easily as your teenager.

Have a maximum of 5 syllables.
Don’t laugh – it’s much easier to say ResultCast.com than MobilePromotionalPodcasting.com, isn’t it? 3 syllables is about optimum.

Use hard consonants, rather than soft.
This means you avoid the dreaded fricative or sibilant S. (Yeah, yeah – I know: here that is in English…) Try to use more letters like b, p, t, d, k, and hard g (like as in garden, rather than edge), over letters and sounds like f, v, th, s, z, and ch. Hard consonants are easier to understand if you’re hearing something for the first time, or with background noise, or if you’re not listening very well, etc.

Is there a time to break these rules?

Sure: when you have enough marketing funds to explain to the public what the heck “Amazon.com” really means. In the meantime, save the marketing funds and play it safe.

What does it take to make the top 100 Tweeters? Check out these interesting facts about the world’s most popular popularity contest.

As you read this, remember:

• TwitterCounter.com tracks 4,069,598 Twitter accounts.
• These stats were taken as of 19:00 GMT -8, August 25, 2009
• Some of the definitions below are rough descriptions because some things on Twitter (and the internet in general) seem to defy description.
• Note that this list is of those with the most followers. This does not take into account two other important stats on Twitter: who is following the most people (and the ratio between that and followers), and who has the most Tweets.

If you examine the top 100 list at TwitterCounter.com, you’ll notice the following trends…

• Ashton Kutcher is still number one. Nobody really knows why.
• The White House ranks dead last, at number 100. (But Obama himself ranks #9.)
• Twitter themselves only rank #5 in their own arena.
• Two of the top 100 are not human: they are cats. (Sadly, there are no dogs represented.)
• A cat (Socks) is more popular than the White House, Larry King, Levar Burton, John Legend, and Nightline.

Of the entire population of the top 100 people;

• Only 7 of the top 100 are not Americans.
• Only 2 are strictly political, non-corporate entities: the White House, and #10 Downing Street
• There are still nearly twice as many men as women on Twitter, as individual ID’s go: 24 women to 43 men.
• 29 of the top 100 are corporate entities, tweeting for marketing purposes.
• Only two of the individual identities are (publicly) not heterosexual.
• Of the individual entities, only 9 are of African-American descent. This includes Oprah, Athlete Shaquille O’Neal, the President, Rapper and Marketer Sean Coombs (P. Diddy), Rapper 50cent, Rapper Soulja Boy, Singer Mariah Carey, Rapper MC Hammer, Actor Levar Burton and Singer John Legend. (Again, notice that only two of these are women.)
• The top three seem to be indicative of most of the list: Ashton Kutcher (white American male), Ellen Degeneres (white American woman / philanthropist / slightly quirky / stylish / TV star) and Britney Spears (white American entertainer, of a sort).

I must ask myself:

• If we are using Twitter for marketing purposes, how many of us know for sure that this is our market, or are we just racking up numbers?
• If Twitter is designed for mobile use, and the biggest group on Twitter is men, does that mean that more men than women are using their cell phones for more than just making phone calls?
• Why in the hell are people following Ashton Kutcher?

I went to see the movie Julie & Julia this evening, partly because it was about a female blogger, and partly because it was about Julia Child, a hero of mine. But I didn’t expect to re-learn an important lesson about writing.

There’s a moment in Julie & Julia where Mrs. Child remarks something like, “It took 8 years of my life to write, and it turns out it was nothing more than something to do so that I wouldn’t have nothing to do.” She fears that writing the cookbook was not the way to reach her audience. She wants American women to know how to produce great French cuisine at home. The book is still not published, and now, she’s 8 years from where she started.

Love of food, or your business, or whatever your topic is, is not enough to write a book. The fact is, Mrs. Child’s book took so long to write because she found that the market she had anticipated in her own mind was not the one she ended up selling to in the end. Proper market research in the beginning can save not just hours, months, or possibly years of work, but also the heartache of having to de-construct something that you have spent so much time building.

Market research today is very different than it was in 1959 – you can spend an hour on Google and learn more in 30 minutes than one could learn in weeks and months in 1959. Time is an Author’s most valuable asset, and it is worth spending a bit of it up front before writing a single word of your book.

This same point is re-made at another point in this great movie, when Julie has been blogging about her passion for almost a year, with thousands of followers, commenters, newspaper articles, and of course, recipes, before she gets a call from a literary agent. In other words, her market research was in her blog. She was already proven.

And yes, the blog did get made into a movie.

Here’s the recipe for the carrot cake that I pictured on Twitter last week. So many of you have asked for this, so I’ll just post it here. What does this have to do with self-publishing, podcasting, writing, online marketing, or anything else that I write about? Once you taste it, you’ll understand.

With thanks to Joan Craven of Craven Communications, my very generous friend in Calgary.

Karrott’s Cake, originally from Enjoy: More Recipes from the Best of Bridge (the yellow one).

1 cup white sugar
3/4 cup corn oil
3 eggs
1 + 1/2 cups flour
2 cups finely grated carrots (I actually put in closer to 3)
1/2 tsp salt
1 + 1/3 tsp baking soda (who wrote this crazy cookbook, anyway??!!??)
1 + 1/2 tsps cinnamon (I used the Poudre Douce from Victorian Epicure and put in a bit more than called for)

The “official” instructions:
Mix oil and sugar, beat well. Add eggs, one at a time and bet after each. Sift dry ingredients and add to egg mixture. Beat all together until well-blended. Fold in raw carrots. Bake one hour at 300~ in greased 9×13 pan.

What I actually did:
I wanted to set this up the night before so that I could throw it together in the AM, so I grated the carrots, and added them to a bowl with all of the other wet ingredients, excluding the sugar, which I put in the fridge overnight. I then put all the dry ingredients into a second bowl, and sifted them through a strainer as I added them. In the morning, I just added the dry to the wet, folded only as long as was necessary to get it wet, dumped it in a pyrex pan sprayed with pam, and went to take my morning shower. By the time I had dressed and made breakfast for our guests, it was time to remove it from the oven. I iced it with bought icing and nobody knew the difference. (Uh, well, at least they didn’t until now.)

Eat well = write well!