5 Reasons to Protect Your .COM with a .NET
So you’re starting a business and have high hopes for turning your ambitions into reality? It’s exciting to venture into the world of entrepreneurism and announce your presence to an online business world. Perhaps you spent hours coming up with the perfect domain name that illustrates what your business stands for while keeping the name succinct and easy to remember. Everything seems to be in order, but did you consider buying not just the “.com” domain name but the “.net” to go along with it? If you haven’t done so, consider these five reasons why doing so is probably a good idea:
- Doing So Helps With Branding Efforts
- To Defend Your Product
- In Case of Future Expansion
- Get Your Business Listed More Than Once
- Ensure You’ll Be Found
Establishing a recognizable and memorable brand means coming up with a clear message about what your business provides. It also means maintaining recognizable and consistent images, logos, colors and fonts. By claiming a .com as well as a .net, you can be sure that you don’t leave the door open for a similar domain claimed by a person or business that has nothing to do with your services.
If you don’t secure both the .com and .net, you make it possible for someone else to purchase the same domain name with the only difference being the extension. Don’t wait until it’s already happened and you have to deal with the aggravation of someone else trying to ride your coat tails by getting hits to their site from people thinking they’re reaching yours.
Another good reason to protect your .com with a .net is preparing yourself for possible expansion of your online presence. Perhaps you eventually want to start a blog on your .net domain or offer a different range of products with the same company name under the .net address.
Any extra SEO effort you can make to help your business rank high in the search engines is going to help out when done right. Say you submit your listing to a big search engine such as “Yahoo” and are listed at #3 for your category. You can also submit your .net address separately to be listed again under a different domain while linking back to your main company site. Note that if you follow this strategy you’re secondary site will need to be positioned differently than the primary one. If Google finds two sites with the same content, it’ll pick one and devalue the other.
Let’s face it, sometimes people struggle remembering their own phone numbers let alone remembering the exact URLs of every site they want to keep tabs on. New customers in particular might take a few tries before they remember your domain without hesitating. By purchasing a .net in addition to your .com you can set up what’s called a “303 redirect” to have the .net address take them directly to your .com.
Needless to say, we own the .net equivalent of Midphase.com and chose to principle #5 in the above list. If you haven’t secured your .net then check out the domain registration page or login to your account and get moving!