Instead of putting "samanthastage dot com", put http://www.samanthastage.com/. This should improve your page rank, and makes the link stand out / easier to use, so people are more likely to visit, generating more traffic for her site.
I can't think of any circumstances where "X dot Y" is appropriate. People do it sometimes for email obfuscation, as if spammers can't figure out how to do search and replace. Google has very little incentive to bothers and users often have even less. Worry about legitimate traffic first.