Brand Building: Picking the Right Domain Name

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about picking the right domain name for your blog. Should you choose to use your business name or use your own name? Maybe you should use something catchy that people will remember. Brand building is the most important thing to consider when choosing your domain name.

What’s in a Name? Quite a Bit Actually…

How important is your domain name? For established brands, companies have paid top dollar for domain names associated with their brands. From Wal-Mart to McDonald’s to Nike to Apple, all of these companies made sure to obtain domain names that were relevant to their brands.

You may ask yourself “Why does this matter to me? I don’t have an established brand.” Your brand isn’t established yet. But with hard work and determination, it may be someday. And selecting your domain name is as crucial as naming your business. You want to take pride in your domain name, just as you take pride in the name of your business.

Branding Considerations

There are several things to consider when deciding how your want to present your website. Is it strictly a site for your business? Are you building a blog to showcase your talents or to express your thoughts, feelings, and emotions? How do you want to make your site visitors feel about your site’s name?

If you are creating a website whose intent is to promote or augment your business, then you definitely want to choose a domain name that reflects that. The issue that may arise is if some other site has already registered the domain name that you want. Fortunately, there are alternative top-level domains to .com, such as .net or .biz. It may even work in your favor to register your domain name with multiple top-level domains, so that yourwebsite.com, yourwebsite.net, and yourwebsite.org all take visitors to your website.

If you are creating a blog, you have a couple of options for creating a suitable domain name. Many blogs use a name that is evocative of their content. A site like Thought Catalog is a good example of this.  It is an online magazine with the goal of empowering creative people. Their domain name is appropriate, as they seek to foster the ideas of free expression and getting their readers to openly discuss those ideas.

Sometimes, using your own name may best suit your purposes. I think that this is something that a lot of creative people consider. Often an artist’s brand is themselves. If you want to find your favorite author’s website, are you going to look for the publishing house or book title or the author’s name? The same holds true for any art. If the internet had existed during the renaissance, wouldn’t all of those great artists have chosen to use their own names for their domain names?

Brand Building and Marketing

Whichever path you decide to take with choosing a domain name, remember to use it to maximize your site’s marketability. Choose a domain name that makes sense for the brand that you are building. Make the most of your domain name, and do everything that you can to protect it.

Teaser: Come back next time when we’ll be talking about leaving a legacy.