Top 5 Domain Branding Tips For Bloggers
Domain names are essential tools for bloggers. They become your brand, and are a valuable business tool. Managed correctly, domain names can also be invaluable in helping obtain attract traffic from search engines. Investing a small investment of time to learn about domains can pay dividends on many levels. Here are five domain branding tips for bloggers.
1. Register Your Domain For More than One Year: There are several advantages to multi-year domain registrations. Foremost among them is the fact that Google favors domains that are registered beyond the current year. This bias by Google is part of a broader domain weighting system that also favors older domains that have been hosting active web sites for years. Google considers domains with "good age" and multi-year registrations less likely to be search spam or trying to game the system. Beyond the search benefits, multi-year registrations almost always save you money through a discount from your registrar, and make it much less likely that you'll lose control of the domain by forgetting to renew it. This happens, all the time. In February, 2006 the domain Jasmin.com expired and was sold at auction for $310,000.
2. Shop For An Affordable But Credible Domain Registrar: There are millions of domain name owners who continue to pay $30 to $35 each time they purchase or renew a domain. But don't just opt for the cheapest provider or the one with the flashiest ads. The victims of the meltdown at RegisterFly almost certainly wish they'd been more selective in choosing their provider. Opt for a registrar that provides the combination of a good price, corporate stability and accountability. Go Daddy.com
sells domains for about $9, while you can get names for $5.99 at 1&1 Interent
.
3. Register Alternate .TLDs For Your Domain Brand: Do you really need to own mybrand.biz or mybrand.info? If you're serious about building and controlling your brand, you absolutely need to own it in other top-level domains (TLDs) like .org and.net. I learned this the hard way. When I bought blogworks.net, the "blogworks" name had already been used in several commercial ventures, so I made no effort to obtain a trademark or service mark for the name. I also neglected to register blogworks.org, which was available. Sometime later the .org domain was registered by a PR agency, which applied for - and was granted - a service mark from the US Patent Office. Even though my blog predated their ownership of the domain. I suppose could've applied first. Buying the .org name would have been even cheaper.
4. Educate Yourself About the Domain Name Aftermarket: Many bloggers develop a blog with an eye toward selling it for a profit. Your content has value, but so does your domain, and you'll want to account for that value as part of any sale. There are many blogs where you can track the domain resale market and valuations, including the Daily Domainer, Domain Name Wire, Domain Tools and especially DomainName Journal. If you're ready to sell, check out the forums at Site Point, Digital Point and DNForum and domain auction services Sedo and Afternic to get a sense for valuations. Look at the auctions and listings that are getting the most attention, and look for common techniques.
5. Lock Down Your Domain Brand on Social Networks: Profile pages on MySpace and other popular social networking sites can be valuable extensions of your blogging brand. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama learned this lesson the hard way, as a dispute over an unofficial site at myspace.com/barackobama became a public relations headache in which the campaign was perceived as strong-arming a supporter to gain control of a profile with more than 160,000 friends.
Posted by RichM 
May 9, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
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May 09, 2007