Do you want to buy a domain name for your one-person consulting business or your small business ecommerce store? Do you want to make sure you get it right the first time?
As a small business owner, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to spend too much on marketing or market to the wrong audience… whatever the case may be, mistakes are going to come so when they happen, try not to beat yourself up too bad about it. In fact, tinybuddha.com has techniques on how to stop beating yourself up over minor mistakes. The main thing about mistakes is to learn from them and don’t make the same mistakes twice.
One of the biggest and somewhat surprisingly common areas where small business owners tend to make the most mistakes is in the purchasing of their business domain name. Making mistakes in this area sounds a bit odd to most people because “how hard can it be to buy a domain name, right?” But the area where people make mistakes is not in the actual purchase of the domain name, it’s more so in the whole thought processes before the actual purchase.
If you think that buying a domain name for your small business is as simple as thinking of a name and clicking “buy now” then you need to stop what you’re doing and take a moment to make sure you don’t make any of these mistakes when purchasing a domain name for your business.
Quick Tips to Remember
- Your domain name should be easy for people to remember
- Try to keep your extension as a “dot-com” site rather than something uncommon
- Don’t include your business entity in your domain name
Mistake 1: Buying a Domain That’s Hard For People to Remember
What’s the goal of your business’ website? For people to visit your site and make purchases, right? Well, they’re not going to be able to do that when they can’t remember the name of your site. People typically aren’t able to remember the name of websites because they either can’t pronounce the name of the site or they can’t spell it.
When you’re trying to devise a domain name, try writing down the name you’re thinking of and spell in it different ways and also say the name out loud and see which one would be the easiest for people to not only say but which one would be easy for people to spell when typing it in their web browser.
Just think about it. There are tons of people who are always on the hunt to share good content and whether it’s a blog on your site or a product from our site, you want every person who visits your site to be able to remember it.
Mistake 2: You Include your Business Entity in the Domain Name
Do you have an idea as to why doing this is such a bad business move? The problem with including your business structure in your domain name is that your business structure could end at any time. You might operate your business as an Ltd (JonesmanagementLtd.com) but then later become an LLC.
With that business structure change, your domain name no longer matches the new structure of your business. If you’re indeed wanting to change your business structure to an LLC, just make sure the domain name is available, and leave “LLC” out of the domain name.
Mistake 3: Choosing Domain Name Extensions That are Not Common
To be fair, when you see websites with domain name extensions like .biz or .us, it’s usually because the .com extension wasn’t available. If your domain name isn’t available in .com on one web hosting platform, you need to look at other web hosting platforms until you’re able to find a .com extension available for your business name.
If you are just plain out of luck in your .com search efforts, your next best domain name extension options would be to opt for extensions that fit your business category. If your business is or is part of a government entity, then you’ll want to use a .gov extension. If your site is a business-related site, you can use the extension of .biz. Lastly, if your site is strictly an informational site, then you get away with using a .info extension.
The purpose of these particular extensions is to give visitors a fairly good idea of the type of site they’ll be visiting.