Jump on Your Domain Name While You Still Can
Posted by Joel Falconer in New MediaJun 20th, 2008 | 15 responses
Branding has become a bit of a buzzword around the web, especially this thing called personal branding. But branding is an old tool in the marketer’s kit, one of the most fundamental, essential components of any endeavor.
Even endeavors where the goal is not to make cash.
Here’s the thing: if you’re attempting to build a brand online, you can’t do it without the right domain name. You need a domain name that matches the name of your site, and while this might sound obvious to some, it’s not to others. If the name of your site and the domain it’s on are different, you’ll blow your professionalism and credibility out of the water.
There’s a lot more that goes into selecting the right name for your site than having a matching domain name ready (though that’s a good place to start). That’s a topic for another article.
There are finite domain names. There are people who snap them up while they’re on the open market and obtainable without spending a whole lot. Worse still, these people don’t snap them up just because they’re available; they look for the domains that are most likely to be needed in the near future and try to sell them for a premium (starting in the hundreds of dollars, but not ending there).
I was working with an organization that owned a domain name under one TLD (top level domain, for example .com or .net) but not the others. The speculators grabbed the .org, .net and .info domains and tried to sell them back to the organization for $500 a piece. This was a lucky case, because the organization already had the dot-com - but it’s not always so easy.
If you have the dot-com (or, in other cases, the dot-net or dot-org) you can get by. Boing Boing uses a dot-net because the dot-com is an AdSense page some squatter snapped up. Can you imagine the money they make now for just having the right domain? Boing Boing is one of the biggest blogs on the net and it’s instinctual to hit up the dot-com address first.
But not having access to the domain name for your business or your personal name is just the beginning of the frustration. It is entirely possible for a malicious speculator to totally and completely ruin your reputation if they have the right URL. It happens more than I like to think about.
It’s never too early to snap up your domain. Do it before you announce your business name or site idea to anybody. Darren Rowse knows how competitive it is: he registered HenriRowse.com almost a week before his son was born!
15 Responses to “Jump on Your Domain Name While You Still Can”
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Joel, you are just so USEFUL. I love reading your site. I could never be so useful to my readers - I just don’t know enough! - so instead I opt to entertain people and make them think. But you are just so VALUABLE.
Yes, I am a little jealous.
I did grab .com .net and .org for MomGrind. Decided against buying others (such as .us). I do agree that even if it’s a hobby, even if you’re not in it for the money, it is still your online presence and your personal brand and you have to protect it.
Hi Joel: I also hear of celebrities buying domain names with their names in it (like angelinajolie.com) before someone else can snap it up and try to sell it back to them. Did you know that there is now a “.me” . Apparently a small country owns it and sells it for a really high price (example: http://www.coca-cola.me). I agree with Vered that you provide very valuable information here :-)
Oh, the coca-cola example above is just an example that popped into my mind, I don’t know if that url actually exists.
@Vered: Well, I refuse to believe that you don’t know enough to be insanely useful. But I will accept the compliment
I’m just glad that I can help a few people out, really. Good call on grabbing the .net and the .org. Unless you’re a big corporation with a big budget or just happen to be loaded, it’s only worth grabbing those three.
@Marelisa: I heard about .me - it’s relatively new, and seems to me that it’s like another version of .name. Despite idiots like Chris Crocker “bursting into fame” from pathetic YouTube videos, most celebrities were once nobodies who were working on their musical/acting careers - if I were them, I’d be grabbing those domains before I became a celebrity. There are people literally sitting around doing nothing but jumping on domains for those who are almost-there, but still up-and-coming so they can make some bucks. And also, thank you for the compliment :)
That is funny! My daughter is thirteen months old and we have already bought her name as her domain. I own my name as well. I LOVE it for email. People get confused when I give it out.
My husband just missed his chance to register the dot com for his name and he kicks himself almost daily.
My mom blog is called The Mom Crowd at themomcrowd.com, but I also bought momcrowd.com without the “the” in case some one mistypes it. I think it is important to buy any variations too.
@Amanda: Damn, I’m behind everyone! My son’s almost three and I still haven’t scraped the change together to get his domain name.
You bring up a very good point: don’t just grab the other top-level-domains, get all the variations too. I lost out on falconer.com by a few days, and now it’s on the market for $59,000. Yeah, right, keep dreaming guys!
Ok, I’m really thinking of buying the .net and .info for my site…I’m starting to get paranoid with this thing.
Thanks for the useful info.
@Chris: Go do it! Stop thinking about it!
.info is on sale at GoDaddy.com right now.
I wrote a simple shell-based utility to simplify the process of checking domain name availability.
You can find it on my blog at: http://ergo.rydlr.net/?p=59
Increasingly now numbers are being used to expand the .com range. This has to link somehow to your business or site name but certainly in the USA numbers such as 66 and 123 or even 911 can impact and when added to the front of your name say 123EasyShop or 66Travel or 911Rentals might be a way of moving. I read though that soon we will be able to use almost any word in the URL such as .love or .home etc etc.
In any even it is certainly addictive to buy domain names the real problem is having enough time and resources to run the sites.
Great post! I noticed the boingboing.com issue too. I think it’s disgraceful. But, maybe I’m overly bias.
It just amazes me, how many hits boingboing.com gets on the basis of the .net address.
And, what’s most sad of all, at least to me, is that there are so many great domains out there that are snatched by people who just put silly ads on them. They have no content at all, just basically a page of spam. Unbelievable! I think of all the people who would have purchased these domain names and made a great site out of them.
@David: I’ve seen that quite a bit, too, though I always felt that those domains were kind of tacky - at least where the number is obviously an artificial thing thrown in just to score a domain.
@Bamboo Forest: Yeah, it’s pretty sad for those who’d actually be using the domains for a good purpose. But I bet the boingboing.com owner was glad he paid that $8.99 for such a lucrative domain.
[…] For writing one of the most useful blogs out there. If I don’t go ahead and implement your advice right away, I bookmark it for later use. For having strong opinions and for not being afraid to […]
For work, we have bought most variations of our company name just to have them so a competitor doesn’t. I like the idea of doing it for branding ourselves as well - I need to look into this. I have one for our family, but not one for my own name.
[…] to know what to do and how to go freelance, I came across an article by Joe Falconer, “Jump on Your Domain Name while You Still Can,” which couldn’t have come at a better time, because I had just discovered […]