Before you venture out on the Internet as a real estate investor, your first task will be to select a domain name for your internet presence. Why is a good domain name important? Once you have a domain name, your web site will reside at that domain name, for example
www.InvestorsSampleDomain.com. Also your email address will be something like: Dan@InvestorsSampleDomain.com and if you are one of the many investors who has a web site but hosts the email address with a third party service such as AOL, Hotmail etc. Please get an email address with your own domain name. You never know who will read your email and see the domain name. It’s a very powerful marketing tool. Why in the world would you have a web site at
www.InvestorsSampleDomain.com but your email address would be dan@aol.com? Do you like advertising AOL? Shouldn’t you advertise your own domain name every time you send out an email address? In regards to selecting a new domain name, the first questions you will need to ask yourself is; do you want a domain name that will cover all or your real estate investing activities or do you want to segregate them. This is a very important question and the opinions are split. We are of the opinion of splitting the domain names for buying and selling real estate. The next item will be to go and think of a name for your domain. There are millions of domains registered every year on the internet. So getting a good domain name is very difficult. You will need to be persistent and try often until you find one that describes best what you do. The first step in picking a domain name is to select a registration service. Some that you can use:
The next step is the most important one, you need to select the actual domain name for what your business is doing. Considerations for the domain name are: - What will the web site do (buy, sell, solicit private money, auction etc…) - How long is the domain name itself. The longer the domain name, the less likely it is someone will type it in from your business card and take a look at it. - How difficult is it to spell the domain name. If you pick a hard to spell domain name, it’s unlikely someone will visit the site. - Will your site use .com or other top level domains such as .net, .US, .INFO etc… Up to this point the prevalent opinion was to register all domain names in the .com top level domain name, but as time has gone by, most people are starting to understand there are other top level domain extensions such as .net, .us, .info and so on. Purchasing a domain name. If you can’t register the perfect domain name, you can try to purchase one on the secondary market. There are many people who sell domain names. Most prices are inflated and it’s unlikely you will find one that is registered and meets your needs and is affordable, but you can try. Web sites that resell domain names are:
- GreatDomains.com
- AfterNic.com
Another consideration is to try to purchase an expired domain name. This is very time consuming and unlikely to yield results. Once you have a domain name, do you want to keep it private? Some domain name resellers allow you to use a service to hide your registration information. Until a few years ago, when someone would register a domain name, every one would be able to query the whois service and look up the owner of the domain name. Not any more. Now for some top level domain such as .com, .net (not all) allow owners of the domain name to hide their ownership. So if you choose to hide your ownership, you now can do so. The service will run you an extra $10 per domain per year (more or less depending on the service provider you use).
Comments(0)