How Important Can a Domain Name be?

In the offline world you can distinguish a business because of its window displays or signs. You can tell that a bank is a bank or a supermarket is indeed a supermarket. On the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story. Your domain name (what you see in your browsers address bar) is the only clue to your work at home business. You do not have visual clues like in the real world. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of words to reach your site. Your prospective visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about until she finds it and reads its contents.

Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A good domain name is one of the best assets you can have. It can make your business stand out in the crowd or leave it floating without direction in internet space.

The need to provide immediate clues to an online business led to generic domain names that instantly provide the user with an idea of what a business is all about, what to expect and look for in a site. For instance, etoys.com is a toy store.

The temptation of a generic name has been so powerful that some companies even pay ridiculously high sums to get the name they want. However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz” that you’d like surrounding your website. Branding has always been about proper names. McDonald's did not name their store Hamburger, Hertz is not called Car Rental, FedEx not Mail Carrier and Kodak is not Photographs.

For better branding results, your domain name should be memorable and easy to remember. A domain name should be short, suggestive of your business category, unique, easy to pronounce and not be difficult to spell.

Domain names can be registered through many different companies known as registrars. Most web hosting companies will handle the registration process for you, but make sure that you are properly listed as the owner of the domain when it is registered. If you have registered a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew it in time or let it automatically renew. You can be surprised at the number of cases where site owners have let a domain name slip by not renewing it in time.

Domain names can also be a golden opportunity to make some easy money. I’m talking about expiring domains. Thousands of webmasters and work at home entrepreneurs invest time, effort and money to promote their site and build up visitors, a.k.a. traffic. Some of them then lose interest and move on but leave their site active. That means that although they still own the domain, they’re not actively promoting it. And they don’t need to. All the automatic marketing systems they’ve put in place are still bringing in traffic. The site basically runs itself.

Now at some point the ownership of those domains is going to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the market, you’ve got an existing stream of visitors. You can either rebuild the site or redirect the traffic to your own domain. Or you could sell the traffic. Opportunities like these are everywhere. There are even companies that let you back-order specific domain names.

Be careful when using other sites, though. There are some black sheep out there that take your money and keep the good domain names for themselves.

About the Author

Tom Moor is a full time work-at-home supporter. Tom accepts wealth accumulation through the internet as to be true and converted to an online business enthusiast after learning about traffic generation strategies. He loves his Work At Home Business.