Best Practices Guide About Domain Names

Domain names are the first step in implementing your
Internet marketing business plan. Domain name
represents your brand. Many people know very well the
importance of brand in the "offline" but even those
can make mistakes in their Internet brand management.
Domain name is the first step in successful Internet
brand management.

Choosing a domain name

It is not easy to register a good domain name
(especially dot com), these days. According to domain
name statistics on the most popular web site for whois
searches Whois Source there are more than 57 million
active generic top level domains registered as of
September, 2005. Majority of these domain names are
.com names. You can view this statistics if you visit
http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/

It is sure that you can't register a classy one-word
domain name but with a little knowledge and
appropriate services you can find a decent one,
especially if you are not interested only in .com
names. Useful site for finding decent domains is above
mentioned Whois Source - http://www.whois.sc There
you will find a free service that will give you 20
domain suggestions based on your keyword. Also, on the
Internet you can find software that focus on domain
names. Using free software Domain Name Analyzer you
can make a list of domain names and this software will
check availability of all included domains so you
won't have to check one-by-one which is
time-consuming. Also this program will give you useful
suggestions.

Another useful thing in find decent domain names is
using expired domain name or back-ordering services.
Using the first service you will get the list of
expired domain names where you can find some really
nice names with a little luck. However, it is not easy
because many people use those services and some
companies have special infrastructure that check
availability of certain domain names every second and
register them. You will have better chance to get your
desired domain using back-ordering services. These
services will monitor for domains you want to register
and once they expire they will make register them on
your behalf. Popular services are SnapNames.com and
Pool.com.

It is recommended that your domain name be short,
catchy, brandable and most important – easy to
remember! You can register a domain name that has no
obvious connections with your business but that is
cool. Then you will have to invest more money in
branding. With good domain name you will save thousand
and thousand dollars in advertising, especially in TV
advertising. If you are an email marketer domains are
also very important because getting email subscribers
without well designed web site is not recommended. It
is recommended that the name of your domain be the
same like your email newsletter name. You can make
"teaser" articles in your email newsletter so that
your readers will have to visit your web site in order
to read complete articles and vice-versa. You can put
"teaser" articles on your web site and require that
people subscribe to your email newsletter to read
complete articles.

Also, in order to find out popularity of certain
keyword combinations you can use keyword suggestion
services. We can recommend you these services:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

Keyword Suggestion Tool
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

You can use Google, enter your keyword combination and
see how much results you will get.

If you are in process of registering a domain name we
can suggest you these two great companies:

Go Daddy – http://www.godaddy.com
Namecheap – http://www.namecheap.com

Internet brand management

We will take our company Infacta, Ltd. as an example.
Infacta is Ireland-based company so it is logical that
we registered www.infacta.ie. However, although we are
Ireland-based company we focus globally. This can
prove the fact that we have clients in more than 130
countries world-wide. So, it is also logical that we
have a domain name in .com extension, too. Dot com
domain name is considered as a global domain name for
companies. Many people think that it is enough to have
2 domain names, but not people at Infacta. For
successful Internet brand management it is not enough.
Beside, .ie and .com domains, Infacta owns domains in
all major generic top level domain extensions (gtld)
like .net, .org and .info. This is to prevent people
or companies to use other Infacta name in other
extensions that can confuse our customers and make
harm to our brand. Beside that, we registered domain
names for our award-winning products GroupMail and
GroupMetrics in different domain extensions and for
upcoming Messaging Times website, as well. Other
famous companies have literally hundred and even
thousand domains in their portfolio for each country
where they have a presence and for their services.
That is called a professional brand management.

There is also one more thing that can show how serious
one company is regarding their domain names and
Internet presence, in general. That is domain
expiration date. Domain names expire. After that
(preferably before that) date domain owners have to
renew them. When you make whois inquiry about certain
domain name, for example at www.whois.sc , beside
registrant info you will see an expiration date.
Imagine that you want to see an expiration date of
your email marketing software company and you see that
the expiration date is the next year or even this
year. This doesn't sound promising if you want a
reliable business partner that will be in the business
in the next 10 years, too, that you can count on. It
is not only important because of whois searches and
credibility, it is important because of search
engines. Google gives better placement for companies
that have domains registered for longer period. It is
a sure indicator that it is a stable business and that
they won't go anywhere. Infacta domain name
www.infacta.com expires in 2011.

There are some services that can help you in Internet
brand management, to monitor that someone else is not
using your trademarked names. One of those companies
that offer brand monitoring services is NameProtect,
Inc. at http://www.nameprotect.com Also, it is highly
recommended that before you register your domain name
to visit http://www.uspto.gov to check if your name
that you want to register has been trademarked to
avoid possible problem and law suits later. USPTO is
official web site of the United States Government for
patents and trademarks. Here you can also register
your patent, trademark or service mark.

If your company's name has a good, generic name and
you want to register a domain, it is most likely that
the .com domain will be taken. Sometimes, it is good
choice to buy it from the actual owner. Also, you can
buy domain names that are highly connected with your
products and services and that will help you in
Internet marketing.

The most popular web sites for buying/selling domain
names are:

Sedo - http://www.sedo.com
Great Domains - http://www.greatdomains.com
Afternic - http://www.afternic.com

Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta.
Infacta is email messaging services company providing
powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail,
software for sending highly-personalized email
messages and Group Metrics, software for email
tracking. For more information visit:
http://www.infacta.com