Amazon Asks Site Owner To Remove Kindle From Domain Name By Steven Lewis

Today's post is an important one for you to read on many levels. It goes to the heart of what this blog is about. As you build your brand, the lessons you learn in this post are priceless and will set you ahead of the curve with most authors and others with a web presence.



Recently, a friend and colleague of mine, Steven Lewis, was contacted by Amazon and asked to change his domain by removing their trademarked "Kindle" from his domain name. Can you imagine having to change months, or years of posts and link relationships? When you read this, you'll realize just what a daunting task this can be.



I approached Steven about sharing his story with us for a couple of reasons. First, I believe that Steven's site is such a great resource for authors that I genuinely wanted to do what I could to help spread the word of his domain change. But second, this is a rare opportunity for me and my readers to learn, first hand, the "whys" and "hows" of a move like this. You truly have a unique seat at the feet of someone willing to open up and share this amazing experience with you.



Well, enough from me. Let's listen and learn from Steven. What you'll read below is really amazing stuff...





Amazon Asks Site Owner To Remove Kindle From Domain Name

By Steven Lewis



When Amazon asks you to change the name of your site there's a lot to do -- technically and in terms of marketing -- as I found out when it happened to me.



A short while ago I had a call from Amazon.com about my website for self-publishing authors, which lived at kindleselfpublishing.com. They were calling to ask, very nicely, if I would change it to something that didn't include the Kindle trademark.



When I set up the site there were many well-established and popular sites that also cover the Kindle and include the word in their titles and domains. I thought it wouldn't be problem for me to do the same. It turns out I was wrong. While Amazon liked what I was writing and the service I was providing, it would rather I wasn't doing it with "Kindle" in the title and domain lest it confuse people into thinking it was an official site. (I do wonder what this means for those other sites.)



I've written about the experience with Amazon on my blog but, in short, they couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing. It did, however, create technical and marketing challenges.



If you've ever built or run a website, you'll know that moving it from one place to another is fraught with the potential for disaster both technically and for your brand.



The technical issues



Finding a new name for my site wasn't a problem. Much of what I do -- publishing and corporate podcasting -- I already did under the name Taleist, a noun I invented to mean "teller of fine tales". That brand -- a place for tellers of tales -- fits perfectly with the mission statement of what was kindleselfpublishing.com -- "Helping writers become published authors".



So Taleist was an obvious and easy choice for a new home.



While the new name was easy, the move wasn't as simple as copying and pasting everything from one domain to another. My site is built over three sub-domains with hundreds of pages and interdependencies -- like one page linking to another. The site also interacts with services like PayPal and video hosts.



I sell guides, reports and how-tos through the site, which are delivered through a members' only section. All of those members had accounts with kindleselfpublishing.com. They needed to move seamlessly to Taleist.com.



Re-writing every link and rebuilding every user account by hand would have taken forever and created multiple opportunities for mistakes.



The site is built in WordPress, in which I would describe myself as an advanced user, but it would have been beyond my skill to effect the move automatically, e.g. having all links containing kindleselfpublshing.com rewritten to swap in Taleist.com.



Fortunately, as I'd written only a couple of weeks before, I didn't build my website by myself. I believe you should build every website as if it will grow and expand -- otherwise, why build it? -- so I got a professional in from the beginning.



Because my webmaster, Dane had setup the site for me, he was familiar with every aspect of it and could handle the backend work required to move it.



Aside from the site breaking in the move, the biggest consideration was Google. Google has indexed my site and delivers most of its traffic. It was essential that Google know the site had moved, that it indexed the new site, and pointed people to equivalent Taleist.com links. This is done through a redirect in the background -- every page on the old site is mapped to the same page on the new site and anyone clicking an old link is taken to the new page.



Fortunately Dane did that for me, so I didn't lose any of my Google "juice".



(The redirect will eventually be switched off as Amazon will be taking ownership of the kindleselfpublishing.com domain.)



Keeping the brand and marketing on track



I'm a long-time devotee of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD), a personal productivity methodology. Recently I supplemented that with Jim Benson's Personal Kanban techniques, which I know other writers have found helpful because I podcasted about it and it's one of my most popular posts.



Both of these tools were essential when it came to planning what to do about the marketing considerations; identifying all the people and systems affected by the move; listing what needed to be done; and working my way through the list.



I needed to identify everywhere that had a link to the old site and make plans to change it. You need a system to capture places as you think of them -- Twitter profile, email signature, other sites, LinkedIn... For me the list went on and on.



The list of people I needed to tell included:

Readers, who needed to know to update any bookmarks so they visited the new site




Subscribers, who get the blog by email and needed to know that nothing changed for them; and subscribers who get the blog through its RSS feed and might need to make a change




Members, who have bought products and will need to login to the new site to get updates and watch the included videos




Affiliates, who have special links to the site enabling them to earn a commission when they refer someone who goes on to buy something from what is now Taleist




Other site owners, who have linked to the old site and must now either go through the inconvenience of updating those links or having a broken link on their site, which isn't a good experience for their readers


I had to work out which groups to tell at which stage of the process and how to do it. I also needed to decide on my "message".  



Getting the message right



Luckily for me the message was easy. The truth is that I'm delighted to be renaming the site Taleist. My principal mistake had been to choose a name that was clear signal to search engines about the content of the site but that wasn't really a brand I could build on or invest in emotionally.



On the practical side, it restricted me to writing only about the Kindle when increasingly I can see that I want to be covering a less specific self-publishing beat.



I'm excited to be working now under a brand that is unique, my own, and that I'm proud of. I'm excited that my scope is no longer restricted, the change has freed me to think of all sorts of other things that I can do and I've already had a rush of great ideas.



That's a message that's a pleasure to be communicating.  



Why blogging is so important



Through the blog, which has been running since November, I've built a relationship with my readers. By giving away so much information for free and letting people get to know me, readers can see clearly who I am, what I'm about and, more importantly in this case, what I'm not about -- messing people around or fly-by-night practices.



If my site was simply a sales page for a number of paid-for products, I wouldn't have that relationship with my community. Regrettably, the move has inconvenienced many members of that community because of the updates they've had to make as a result. Because of the relationships I have built up, people have been generous and tolerant.



I write about 3,000 words of content a week for the blog; it takes hours; and I give it away. The dividends it pays are in those relationships and the trust it engenders with people, one of whom is Tony who very kindly offered space on his blog for this post.  



My advice to you

Don't use "Kindle" or another trademark in your site name!




Build your site as if it will grow -- putting my site on a proper foundation from the outset made it easier to move




Find a productivity system -- like GTD or Personal Kanban -- that works for you. When you take on a big project -- like, say, writing a book -- doing the most you can in the least possible time will pay off




Approach self-publishing as a business -- much is written about how self-publishing is turning the publishing world on its head and traditional publishers need to adapt or die. True but there's much we can learn from traditional publishers about selling books as a business. If you've approached your web presence as a business, you're more likely to have it setup in a proper, structured way that makes it easier to grow or to cope under strain




Document what you do and use the right tools -- I'll now have a comprehensive list of everyone I need to communicate with and every service I need to update when I make changes; also, by using a service like Google Analytics, I'm able to trackback to see where my visitors are coming from and contact those sites to ask them to make updates, too




Build relationships with your readers -- one day you might find yourself asking something of them, which will be harder if you don't have a relationship with them


I hope you'll visit me at Taleist. I can certainly promise you that this one isn't going anywhere!



-------- Steven Lewis is the author of a number of guides to self-publishing on the Kindle and, it shouldn't surprise you to learn now, that he can be found at Taleist!





  



























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Tony Eldridge is the author of The Samson Effect , an action/adventure novel that Clive Cussler calls a "first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure." He is also the author of the Twitter marketing book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests . His new novel, The Lottery Ticket , was just recently released on Kindle.