Marketing For Owners is a place for small business owners, medium business owners, and anyone in sales or marketing. What we do is we teach you a marketing system that is so darned simple, it’s ridiculous. It’s all free. All the information is there.
If you can’t make some money or improve your life with that information, you’re not listening right. Now — let’s get back to the podcast.
Let’s talk domain names. It’s a popular question. There are not many .coms, .co.UK’s, .za, co.za, or .au.coms or .ca’s left.
So what do you do? Do you grab the dot biz? Do you grab the dot info? Do you grab the dot net or do you grab the dot name, dot me, dot mobile, dot Coca-Cola? Who knows?
There are hundreds and the answer is no, you don’t.
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When it comes to a domain name, you want to be found in Google. Google is still the de facto search engine. It’s free traffic and it’s easy. People will assume you’re a dot com or a dot co dot UK or whatever. So whichever country you’re in – so if you’re in the UK, you want the dot co dot UK and you want the dot com if possible.
If you’re in the USA, you just need the dot com. Do not worry about grabbing the others because there’s hundreds. You can’t buy them all and renew them all.
Now, if you’re in Canada, you’d want the dot CA and the dot com. The reason for that is Google gives extra weight in the country for the country-specific what’s called a TLD, top level domain. Now there are other domains. There is .fr for France, .it and you’ll see companies like Bitly, that have their own domain in the URL, or things that end in dot IO and all sorts.
That’s just easy for them. But when you’re talking to somebody, you can tell them your domain name. That’s easy. So no matter what it was. But if it was not the dot com or it was not the country-specific, you’re not going to pick up that free traffic from Google.
You might but you’re going to pick up a fraction. So, for instance, the dot info’s, you can get them very cheap and for that reason, all the spammers use them. Google knows this. It doesn’t work. If you’re a dot org, of course that means you are an organization;
Whichever way around. That kind of thing may work for you. If you’re a university, the .ac or whichever it is in your country but for a .edu, e-d-u. But get that country-specific.
Now what if your name is not available? For instance, we’re in marketing. Marketingforowners.com. Trust me, it took a long time to come up with the name. Every single version of marketing is dot com, is gone but we stuck with it until we found one. Now you may be an existing business with an existing name.
Say you’re based on I don’t know, your Top Dog Photography and there is already a Top Dog Photography. You don’t want to go Top-Dog-Photography.com because there’s already another one. So if people are looking for them, they’ll mistake them for you and the other way around.
You want to get something slightly different. If it’s gone, it’s gone and you just have to get over it. So you could get Jon’s Photography or The Real Top Dog or Top Dog Camera Work, Top Dog Studio, Top Dog Portraits, something like that, something similar.
When they get to your website, they’re going to see the name. And if for instance, say you’re in the UK and topdogphotography.co.uk was available, you can’t get the dot com because it’s taken.
Don’t do that. Don’t because people will a lot of times just enter dot com and they’ll go to the other site, they’ll think it’s you and they’ll just go with them. It happens. So be careful. If you’re going to use your name, remember anything based on your name.
For example — Marketing For Owners is not Jon Butt’s Marketing because if I wanted in the future to sell the business, something happened or if I was hit by a bus and my kids inherited and wanted to sell the business, for example, who’s going to want it?
There’s no Jon Butt. But as Marketing For Owners it’s more of a brand, etc, etc. So consider that. But that’s the answer in relation to domains. There are millions. Country-specific .com, do that.
Friendly Follow
Today is Wednesday. We are going to give a friendly follow to a fabulous marketer and an all-around great lady, Marie Forleo.
Her website is at marieforleo.com. You can look up Marie Forleo TV. Fantastic. She’s just a fantastic entrepreneur. She’s been talked about by Oprah, Richard Branson, and she’s not just for women, all of you.
She really is the real deal. Follow everything she does, learn from her. She has a great product as well. She set up with Laura Roeder a few years ago.
A lot of people went through that and her mentoring, just wonderful. The real deal, go see what Marie does.
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What does your domain name say about your site?
