The Dot Before The Com

By Marc Majers

Today if you are starting a business, your company name is everything. However, once you decide upon a name, an ever more perplexing challenge is seeing if the domain name is available. What I am going to express to you here is merely my opinion, however trust me, I have seen many companies fail in the domain game. Secure as many extensions as possible. Also, get as many different spellings of your domain and then redirect them to your site. In the end by following a few simple steps, you can save yourself big money and with a little preparation, you can save yourself a huge headache.

A good plan for any startup business is before you solidify your business name is to first make sure the domain address is available. Your business name is as important as your product's USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and your domain name should be as well. If your domain isn't available as a .com, your only option may be butcher your name just for the sake of getting that precious .com. For example, if your company name is Public Storage and PublicStorage.com is taken, you might settle on Public Storage.com or PubStorage.com. The dot COM extension is still the most popular and most recognizable in the modern world. Sure there are approximately fifty domain extensions, some for each country like .ca for Canada, and many more are in the works; however after the rise and fall of innovation and sporadic growth of the net, the quest for .com is still king. If your company has been in business before the dot COM explosion and you were not fortunate enough to grab your domain name, you can probably relate to my comment about the butchering of your domain name.

Back in 1997, when the Internet as we know it was still in diapers there was this trend by many young dot-commers to gobble up any domain names that were available. Then with a stroke of the hand, resell it at higher price. One example was Glidden Paint, who decided that they wanted to establish a web site at this time. The company had been in business since who knows when and you would figure their domain would mean everything. Well low and behold, they did not own Glidden.com; some kid in Wisconsin bought it three years prior and wanted megabucks for the URL. This paint mogul decided not to pay for the domain and settled on GliddenPaint.com. I did notice recently they must have finally bought the domain after years of assumed internal frustration. Every time a customer or client asked for their domain address, they would have to say, "No it's not Glidden.com, it's GliddenPaint.com."

Here are a couple of rules that I suggest when registering your domain name for your business. When you can get a dot COM for your domain, buy the dot COM for your organization, even if you are a non-profit. If the .com isn't available and you have to purchase the .net, then just be aware that many folks might not be able to find your site because they have got .com on the brain. Get as many domain extensions of your company name as possible; for example buy the .net, .org, and .info if you can.

Also, I would suggest buying common misspellings of your site name. You never know how people are going to access your site. You don't know what they are typing into search engines or into the browser address bar.

You can then redirect all these related domains, the misspellings and other extensions you have acquired, to your main URL; this way there are many ways to reach your site. Domains are very cheap now since Network Solutions was deregulated a few years ago; check out GoDaddy.com or Names4ever.com to register names for as low as $6.00 a year. A clear example of how this low cost game plan could have saved some embarrassment was during last year's presidential election.

During the vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney mentioned to millions of viewers to check out FactCheck.com to verify his statistics. However to his error, he meant to say FactCheck.org; this caused the .com site to crash because it was not ready for such high traffic. The non-related political .com web site got so perturbed by this verbal slip of the tongue that they redirected their organization's URL to a millionaire non-supporter of Bush who had an anti-Republican propaganda website. The lesson learned here is no matter what you do, try by all means to get the .com of your website. Once again, even if you are a non-profit organization, just re-direct the .com to the .org domain extension.

Make sure when you decide upon a business name that your domain name available. Domain names are cheap today so get as many extensions as possible. Also, get as many different spellings of your domain and then redirect all your related domains to your main site. In the end, following a few preventive steps can reap cost savings and divert a major headache.

MM~