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Picking a Domain Name

Picking a domain name might seem really stressful, but it doesn’t have to be that intense. Watch to learn how to choose the best domain name for your business.

Transcript

Picking a domain name may seem really stressful. It’s where people are going to go to see your business, it’s connected to your brand, it’s where everyone’s going to visit your website. It doesn’t have to be that stressful.

Side note, you can actually change it at any time. You’d kind of have to have someone who knows what they’re doing if it’s been out there for a while you’ve got it in a million different places, but you can change it whenever you want.

But how do you get off on the right foot? How do you start off making sure that you get the greatest domain that you possibly can? Well dot com is still going to be the ideal because there’s a little button on some mobile keyboards to make it easy for people to type in. It’s what people are most familiar with. But really anything you can get is going to be fine because most of the time it’s just going to be a link somewhere that somebody can click or tap on or it’s a button, it’s not typed out as often as it used to be.

Another key thing is to type it out and read it and send it to a few people and make sure there aren’t any goofy misreadings of it or bad words or anything like that. So just keep that in mind as well.

Another thing to keep in mind is if you’re going to make email addresses out of it, make sure that it’s easy to say over the phone. Anything that’s phonetically really similar that you have to spell out like P as in Peter, B as in Boy, all of that stuff makes it really annoying to have to spell out. So if you can make it regular words or something that’s really easy to say over the phone or quickly, that’s ideal as well.

You can always add hyphens to domains, but I usually advise against it as well as numbers just because it’s on a totally different phone keyboard. You have to sort of click that symbol thing to be able to do hyphens. And you can also call hyphens dashes. People might not know what you mean by hyphen, so unless a number or a hyphen is really integral to your brand and your business, I usually try to advise avoiding them whenever possible. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just not ideal.

The point here is just to make it as easy as possible for people to find you. Maybe you could buy a tiny version, like an abbreviated version, and get your own little tiny URL that you can use to track clicks and make a long domain shorter so that you can share it on social and have it be really easy to see.

But the main thing is do not make this an excuse to not put out your website. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can change it at any time. It’s going to be fine. My main thing is buy it. Do a little search. There’s places that you can go to find to see if a domain is taken, if it’s even remotely what you might want and you’re not totally sure, buy it.

It’s easier to let a domain expire than it is to wait for a domain to become available. So buy it if you’re not sure. It’s like $15 less. Buy it. It’s a whole year.