MBA964 How to Choose The Best Domain Name For Your Business

Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that delivers business lessons you need to build the business you want with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online over at one. In today's lesson you will learn how to choose the best domain name for your business. When we say domain name, we mean your website address like Amazon.com or dollarshaveclub.com when you get started, you need to choose the right name so people can find you easily. This is one thing you should take some time to think about and decide very carefully. And in today's episode, I'm going to give you the do's and don'ts. I'm going to give you the things you should really stay away from when it comes to choosing your domain name, as well as some of the things you should look for so you can be found easily on a search engine like Google. We'll also get into does it make a Difference to register a.com/net, co which one should you choose if one is not available? All that and a whole lot more. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. This episode is brought to you by Pitney Bowes. No matter what you send or how often Pitney Bowes has your sending solution, print postage from your office and take advantage of special discounts such as saving $0.03 per letter and up to 39% off USPS shipping rates. Plans start as low as $5 per month. Visit PB to learn more and sign up for a free trial. That's pb.com MBA terms apply. See site for details. Domain Names that's just a fancy word for your website address. Your URL. It's a big decision. You want to make sure you nail it for your business. So let's get started with some of the big don'ts. There's three major don'ts I have when it comes to choosing your domain name, and that's hyphens, numbers and hard to spell words. I highly recommend you do not include hyphens in your domain name like microphone wizard.com why? Because it's just not necessary. It doesn't really look that pretty in the URL and if you want people to go directly to your website, they're often going to forget to put the hyphen that's not a Huge deal breaker because often people Google your business name to find your website rather than actually put in the website address in the search bar or in the browser bar. But I would stay away from it if possible. Number two numbers. Now you might be saying, hey Omar, your website 100mba.net, 100mba net has numbers in it. Yes, it does. That's why I'm recommending not to do what I did. I'm learning my lesson now. It's not again a deal breaker. We do find people can find us. But I do have to make the point to say 100 MBA net rather than 100 MBA net because again, they don't know if it's the word 100 or the words in this case or the number 100. And that goes for any number. To be quite honest, if I had to do it all over again, I was starting the $100 MBA all over again. I would probably not choose a URL with numbers in it. It wasn't a catastrophe, but it's just a struggle that I have to go through. Especially with a podcast where all my communications with audio. I need to actually tell you 100 MBA. You're not going to get it. It's not a link you're clicking. You get the point. If you can stay away from numbers, that would be better. Now I know some businesses that buy every single variation. Like for example Tim Ferriss website, the four Hour Workweek. He's bought all the different variations. Four hour work week with a number with the word. But again, he himself says it's a pain. And lastly, hard to spell words. If you could stay away from words like entrepreneur, which is notoriously misspelled, completely butchered most of the time. Keeping your domain name simple, short words. That's best. Now, what are some things I recommend when it comes to choosing your domain name? If you can get an exact match of your business name with your domain name that is perfect. Or a shortened version of it. Let's say I run an ecommerce store called Notebooks Warehouse. If I have this business and I can find notebookswarehouse.com available, I gotta snatch that up. An exact match of your business is great. How do I know this? Because my other business, our software product, Webinar Ninja, we have the exact name in Our domain, webinar ninja.com it's just easy. When people know about the name of your business, that's the first thing they're going to try, the name of the business. Com. So if you can grab that domain name One that exactly matches the name of your business. That's ideal. That's the first thing you should try. Obviously, if you're using your name as your brand, like you have a personal brand, then you really should try to grab that URL, grab that domain name if it's available now. Side note, if your name is available right now in a.com, a.net, a co, grab it now. This is like a real estate gold rush. You need to make sure that you grab your name as a domain name because you can use it in the future. Even if you use it as the place where you put your resume or CV or your personal blog, whatever, one of the first things I did Is grab Omar zhome.com I'm still working on my personal branded website because I'm working on my speaking career and that's where my speaking career work is going to live. But having the domain is so important. So just side note, make sure you search your name, grab any kind of extension, com, co, IO, whatever's available. Now, if your business name is quite long, if you can find a shortened version of that name as a domain name, that's perfect. Like if your business is called SEO Experts r Us, then obviously SEO experts.com.net co is great. Now that's a tough one to get. But even if you get something like SEOR us a variation, that's a good alternative. So if you have a long name, try to shorten it as much as possible to grab a great domain name. Now, the reason why I highly recommend having your business name in the domain name is because it's just going to help with SEO. Google has stated that keywords in the domain name will have preference in ranking. So if I go back to this example, SEO experts are usually, and I had the domain SEO experts, when people search that word or phrase SEO experts, Google will give me a preference because I own the domain name with that actual domain with those words in it, with those keywords in it. That gives my site more authority. Now, having said that, this also applies to the keywords in your industry. So if I go back to our business webinar Ninja, the word webinar, what we do is in the name of the business and in the domain. So if somebody searches webinars, we automatically get some juice because our domain has the word webinars in there. We have some sort of authority when it comes to that word. Now again, the reason why search matters is because a lot of people find your website via search, so they search your Website, your domain is linked to those words. You're going to be found, people are going to click you, they're going to find you. Now what about one name domains? Those are brilliant and those are great. Like google.com, facebook.com, amazon.com, apple.com, these are awesome, easy to remember, simple, clean. Even if These sites were I.O. or CO or net, those are still awesome domains. There is a brand authority by just having one name. Now having said that, don't bend over backwards to change your whole business name to make it one word if you want that domain. Now you hear me saying.comco IO. What about these extensions? Do they matter? Well number one, if the.com of your domain name is available, always take it. The.com of any website is becoming more and more rare. And in my opinion, in about 10 years.com websites are going to be seen as super authority websites. And 10 years fly by real quick. Now if it's not available in the.com do not worry about it. Net Co and IO are great alternatives. I'd probably go with a net before anything else. But.comio are not bad either. And of course if you're a non for profit organization.org is a great domain, has a lot of authority. And don't worry if the.com is not available now, it could be available in the future or you can buy it from the owner later on. Just get the ball rolling. You know, when we were Registering webinar ninja the.com wasn't available. Somebody owned it. We had to take the dot co and we ran our business on dot co for a very long time. In fact, we only switched to dot com about six months ago. About six months before that I was able to buy the domain from the owner who owned the dot com. So that could be an option in the future. Don't be discouraged. There's a lot of fun extensions out there as well, like Ninja and Expert and dot Club. These aren't bad either. But I always see.com as your number one choice. Then net, then co IO. Guys, I got a couple more tips when it comes to choosing the right domain name for your business. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork in Office365. We at the $100 MBA run a remote team. That means we have players all over the planet. And sometimes it can get really chaotic trying to communicate with everybody all the time, whether it's with chats or email or files. It'd be great just to have one place to look at everything. Microsoft Teams is a single workplace where you can work, share and connect with the people in your work life. Teams brings together chats, meetings, files and apps all in one place. No more chaos. Take teamwork where you work or with apps for mobile and desktop. So whether you're sprinting towards a deadline or sharing your next big idea, Teams can help you and your team achieve more. Microsoft Teams in Office365. Visit office.com teams to learn more. A few more tips when it comes to choosing your domain name before we wrap up, there's a great tool online called namemesh.com that's a name mesh.com and this is a cool website that will give you all these different variants of the keywords for your business. So again, if your business name is SEO Experts R Us, you can just type that in. It'll give you all these different types of variations or suggestions for great domain names and it'll even tell you which ones are available and which ones are not. And you can filter for.comio.net.co it's definitely one of my favorite tools when it comes to researching domain names, and it's quite interesting because you'll find domain names in your marketplace that are available that you may want to just grab and use later on, whether you want to forward it to your own website or build an authority blog around that area of expertise. One last tip. When it comes to your name in the domain name, be careful of double letters, especially when it comes to two words that are being combined or that are going one after another. Let's say for example, Carradicals.com youm have the R at the end of the word car and then the r at the start of the word radicals. Sometimes people will mistype it or not, remember or not see that they've put one R instead of two R's. Again, doesn't matter too much when people search, but when people are going to your website specifically whether to log in or they know your website address, it can get kind of annoying. Sometimes it might be something you want to kind of steer clear of just in case. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, let me know in an itunes rating. In review I read every single review. I love hearing from you guys. I love hearing what you love about the show and also helps other people learn about the show from you. And while you're writing a review. Make sure you hit subscribe because you're not going to want to miss tomorrow's episode. A Q and a Wednesday episode where I answer a listener's question. And. And that question is, I'm not in love with my customers. Did I choose the wrong business? Such a good question. I answer it in tomorrow's episode. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Set a deadline for yourself. When it comes to choosing your domain name, you can go on forever. We're talking about you can take a month to choose your domain name if you let it happen. So set a deadline, put it in the calendar. Say I have to have a domain name registered for my business by this day. Hold yourself accountable. You don't really need that much time to do all this research and apply the things you learned today. If you really want to, you can dedicate about three to four hours to really just nail this down. But if you don't put a deadline, you can really waste your time and justify in your mind why you're wasting your time. Because it's so important. And it is. But you don't want it to drag on forever. You gotta move on to other things, like having your product for sale. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.