Business owners who are about to launch an online business have a lot on their plate. From new clients to employees, to business premises, they need to cope with dozens of problems. However, there’s one thing that might be forgotten during this process, but plays a vital role in every online business – the domain name. It will determine your future success both online and offline. Therefore, we’ve analyzed the most important steps when choosing that name.
First domain, then business
If you’ve already registered your business with the local small business agency, finding the right domain name will be extremely difficult. So, what you need to do is perform these two actions simultaneously. For instance, you could have a few brainstorming sessions with your business associates or friends and try different names. Needless to say, every business/domain name you come up with should be checked in an online domain name database, like instantdomainsearch.com. Only when a name is available, should you proceed with your business registration. That way, you’ll save a lot of assets and time. What’s more, your business will be able to start working immediately.
The beauty of brevity
Since words are becoming an endangered species on the Web (which only raises their value), you should use them as concisely as possible. As for a catchy online business name, don’t use too long strings of letters or words. For example, if you want to launch a website and a business that sells old books, sellingoldbooks.com will be a bad choice. You should rather go for oldliterature. It has only two words, but it contains the word literature, which should leave a stronger impression on the target audience. So, the modern online context requires breve textual content, which is why your domain name should be short but easily memorable. If not sure how to get there, you can contact local journalists or even online copywriters, to help you meet those conditions of brevity.
Think globally, work locally
Only businesses that don’t have any connection with their offline reality are allowed to neglect it. On the other hand, if you need your local community to make your business grow, this has to be seen in your domain name. You see, every website name has several roles. First of all, your content will address its visitors universally. Secondly, you’ll add some details that will contribute to your local differentiation. After that, as your brand keeps pushing the envelope, international visitors will also be attracted by domain name and the content.
Apart from that, if you realize you have many visitors from foreign countries, start thinking about launching several versions of your website, localized to different native languages. Seeing how you may be forced to get more than one, looking for cheap domains is definitely a frugal course of action.
Avoid copyright clash
It might happen that somewhere else in the world, someone else has launched a website with the same domain name as yours the same day you did it. Such a situation will definitely cause a copyright issue. This is why you have to protect yourself beforehand. Therefore, when you’ve found a name you like and checked if it’s free, go and register your business at once. In some countries, you can do that on your own, on the website of their Internet administration (check out the simple solution of the Australian Government). However, in some other countries, you’ll need to have your domain name registered by a commercial provider. In that case, double-check if the website is registered on your name. Any of those two types of registration will protect your domain and business name from any sort of copyright infringement.
Your domain name will be the first contact that your customers have with your business. Hence, it needs to grasp their attention and connect with them emotionally. This name also needs to contain your official business name, as well. Because of that, don’t choose your name hastily, but think it over and prepare an appealing solution that will attract new customers to your business enterprise.
Guest article written by: Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology websites and regular contributor to Technivorz.