Would a rose.ai smell just as sweet as rose.com? Is a vanity domain name worth the price?

Hello, my name is Jim James. Welcome to Speak PR. This is the podcast for anybody that's got value locked up in their organization, and they're just looking for ways to release that with cost-effective and simple ways to do so using public relations. I've been an entrepreneur for over 25 years and running an international public relations agency as well. So on this podcast, I share tools and tips and case studies that I know work. Today, I'm going to talk about domain names, and what is in a domain name, and some aspects that you should think about if you're looking at buying a domain name for your business or your organization. I'm doing that with experience because I've just been buying the domain name for the Speak PR podcast today. So we're going to look at How many should buy, how much you should pay, how you should protect it, and what does Google look for? Now, a domain name. What's in a name? As they say, a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. Is it true that you have to own a vanity domain name or not? My view personally, having bought domain names now since 1995, is that the most important part about a domain name is the marketing. But there's a little bit more to it than that. So today I looked and purchased the speakpr.co domain name using GoDaddy. The first year was at £9.99, and then it's going to cost me £29 a year. Now, in the past, I have bought all the domain names that sort of complement something like, for example, East West PR. I bought eastwestpr.tv, eastwestpr.com.sg, eastwestpr.co.uk. Eastwestpr.live, and so on. Now, what I found though, of course, was that I was only putting content really on the eastwestpr.com website. And the, the idea that I had that search engines would find all these other domain names and I would route the traffic through to my final destination actually proved to be untrue, because the search engines don't just register and look for domain names. They only look for domain names with content on them. Speakpr.com is not available. That was my first choice. And if I'd be willing to pay $48 to GoDaddy Plus, 20% of whatever I was charged for buying the domain name, then GoDaddy said they could help me with that. I looked at speakpr.biz and .info, and I could have bought those 2 for an extra £19 a year. I did look at speakpr.co.uk, but then I thought actually we end up with little subdomains, and as I've already got listeners to the Speak PR Podcast in over 55 countries, I really want this to be a global, a global offering, not just a local domestic one. I thought that then I would stick on speakpr.co, which is what I've bought. Then I found speakpr.inc, which I thought would be quite fun because of obviously the reference to getting print and getting ink in PR, which is the old, the old expression for PR. So for £9.46, I bought that, a little bit of a gift to myself. But what I didn't do this time was buy any of the add-ons that GoDaddy will offer. So you have to be careful with GoDaddy because you can end up buying a $9.90 domain name and spending over $30 because they have you buy domain name protection, auto-renewal, multiple years, and so on. So now I just go for the very basic 1 year, see if it's going to work. No protection, I'm not worried about— they say 150,000 domain names are under threat each year. I'm assuming probably my fairly invisible domain name is not going to be one of them just yet. Now I'm doing this because eastwestpr.com is a domain really focused on international public relations, and the Speak PR program, which is a mastermind, is really starting to distract the main message for the PR firm. For the PR firm, we do work for international companies. We do work for them in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines. We work for multinationals and smaller companies, and we do media relations, LinkedIn management, digital marketing. And it's a network of consultants that I have around the world who are able to deliver this work. The Speak PR Mastermind is really a training program for all those entrepreneurs or organizations that really don't have the budget yet for an agency or would really just prefer to manage it in-house. It's my way of helping the 98% of companies that are less than 250 people and can't afford an agency. So I've decided to separate it out into its own domain. But there are some things that I've learned over the years about buying too many domain names. Back in the mid-'90s, when I started GoEvents.com, I bought a whole slew of domain names. Including paying $10,000— still makes me shudder to think— to someone who had bought goevents.com without the hyphen. So I bought GoEvents with the hyphen and GoEvents without the hyphen. Of course, in all of my marketing material, I could only promote one of those, and the investors at the time quite rightly questioned my judgment on buying the extra domain name. It seemed at the time, and was the fashion, But now I think the rule is quite different. Certainly for me, I'm just buying the one domain that I need, and it seems as though many of the big companies like Sony, IBM, Apple, they are just buying the domain that they can promote. They're not necessarily worried about all the other domains. But let's look at some of the other tools and tips that you might want to think about when you're looking at buying a domain name. So think about if you want to create, for example, a campaign-specific or a product-specific domain. That's great as long as you've got the marketing resources and the content to go on it. So buying a domain for just a unique site for the purposes of owning the domain name may only cost $9, $15, but it does rack up if you buy them up Over multiple years, so one I think lesson that I've learned is not to buy a domain name if I can't support it. I started a project called Silver Fox Entrepreneurs, and I bought silverfox.entrepreneurs.life, and that's been very successful. But I also bought maturepreneur and maturepreneur.net because they are similar in the meaning for the Silver Fox Entrepreneur. But I I didn't have enough content to run across all these sites. In the end, I've tried to auction those off. Another point is that boring names like, you know, dogs.com, pets.com, it's actually hard to brand those. If they're worth quite a lot of money, insurance.com, obviously worth quite a lot of money, But those really are nouns, you know, they are the name of a particular industry. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can sell product off it. It may be great as a directory website, but it may not be a great brand website. There are premium domains. When I was buying this domain for Speak PR, I could have bought getnoticed for $2,500. And there are a number of other domains out there to do with public relations and courses and so on. And my experience is that I am better off to spend the $9.99 on the domain name and spend $2,000 on promoting it. Another element that comes up is this idea of exact match, that if you own the words that are frequently searched, like, you know, restaurant near me, for example, that, that would then come highest in the search engine rankings. But in September 2012, Google issued a software update that explicitly devalues domains with exact name, exact match domain names. So another one is not buying misspellings. So in the past, it was fashionable to buy every domain that was a derivation of your own if there was a typo. The challenge with that is you end up with lots and you have to do lots of redirect, but these things do add up. You can end up like in the first year, this one domain is only $10, but there— or £10, but then it'll be £29. So you can imagine you can spend, you know, $200, $300, $400 a year just on domain names and And that's without the protection and all the other widgets that people try and sell you. Now, apparently short is good, 6 or 7 letters. I guess that's because it means it's harder to be mistyped. I've gone for the speakpr.co because that represents company, and I'm working in the business-to-business space, and I've made the the brand very straightforward. I'm telling people what to do, which is speaking about PR, and to make it less complicated, because my experience, especially with international marketing, is that the more variations you create, the more niche it becomes. For example, by idiom, the less well understood it will be by people who don't speak English as a first language. Now, I've also trademarked the Speak PR name And my understanding is that you can also complain or take action against people that use a domain name that is contravention to your trademark, but that would be, I guess, a lot of hassle. But what you might be able to do is to prosecute someone for promoting a good or service. You probably couldn't take the domain name away from them, but you could prosecute them if they were trying to use your trademark. So there are some issues there about protection of the brand. The view of creating a .net and a .com, those are the main domain names, but I think that, uh, going for something a little bit different like .co can be okay, could be quite interesting. And there are some nice ones now like .ai and .io. .io for people in artificial intelligence, for example. So those are also ones, along with the country ones, that are becoming popular. There is— I've mentioned next the point of getting the domain name noticed. There is a website called entireweb.com, and you can enter the domain name for free, or for $29 they will submit domain name to other people. So what's in a name? I think probably quite a lot. Having had quite long domain names in the past, one of the functional problems with that is typing it in. Another one is that when you have your own email account attached to the domain name, you end up needing to have an abbreviation because it is frankly just unwieldy So I've also gone for speakpr.co because it's not too big on the business card and it's not too cumbersome when it comes to setting up email, and it says what I do. And I think the domain name is another example in internet marketing where it's worth just keeping it simple, especially at the beginning when I don't really have much of a business, just an idea. I want to protect the basic idea But spending too much money on registrations and protections and all kind of offerings that people like GoDaddy or Network Solutions have can just increase the budget that's better spent on promotion. So it's a short topic, which is domain names. There are people that make a living doing it. You can also auction your domain names. I've been trying to do that with some of the domain names that I bought for the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs. What I found about that is then you need to pay to become an auctioneer, and you pay a commission for doing that. And some domain names are worth having and selling, but most of them, it seems, really are just sort of cannon fodder. eastwestpr.com now as a domain name is worth over $2,000, which is great, but of course I need that for my own business. So if you're looking at buying a domain name for your business, buy one that describes what you do, buy one that you can put content on, buy one that makes your life simple, and then move on and get on with putting out the content. So with that, I thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. We have a weekly newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe, please come to eastwestpr.com. We have a mastermind session that we are launching coming soon. You can check that out at eastwestpr.com/speakpr. And we are obviously podcasting, so do subscribe. Share this with a colleague or a friend or anyone you know that's got value to unlock in an organization if they could just find some simple and effective ways of doing so. And that is one of the ways that you can use a domain name is to get noticed. So thank you so much for listening to this episode, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you have a successful domain name registration application and traffic.