The Value of Your Domain
I will be launching the new branding for Marketing Integrity this coming week. As part of the brand development I decided in addition to MarketingIntegrity.ca to pursue MarketingIntegrity.com. In January when I launched this company I discovered that MarketingIntegrity.com was owned by BuyDomains.com. BuyDomains is a company that purchases domain names (and currently owns hundreds of thousands of them) and will sell them to you at premium pricing.
I sent an e-mail to them inquiring on the price for MarketingIntegrity.com. Their quote…$2,688.00! After a little back and forth, they were willing to accept an offer of $1400 if I would purchase the domain within 24 hours. I really wanted to proceed. I wanted so badly to own the dot com rights to my company’s name. I wrestled with the decision and had a very sleepless night on Tuesday. I spent a lot of time working on different branding angles on Wednesday to see if I could avoid the steep cost. In the end, I just could not in good conscience proceed with such a high expenditure for a company in its early stages.
For the record, the customer service side of the BuyDomains.com representative (Justin), was excellent. He was very responsive and answered all my questions. It just was too big a financial commitment to make at this stage in the life cycle of Marketing Integrity.
So, the thing for you to know as the owner of a small business is that if you can still get your dot com business name now, purchase it immediately before someone else does (whether you are ready for your web site or not). This also applies to your personal name in dot com format. For the price you have to pay now (less than $25 from most domain name registrars), it is well worth it so you control your brand. Once someone else has that control, it can become a costly endeavour to retrieve if you can buy it at all.
The other point is this. If your dot com name is not available, consider the slogan your business uses. Maybe it is your mission, tag line, or type of service you provide. Sometimes that can be a viable alternative. If you are not sure how to proceed or brainstorm through the alternatives, there are marketing companies that can help you navigate through that process.
So, you may be wondering…what did I decide to do for Marketing Integrity? Our branding slogan will be “Navigate Your Marketing”. So I registerred NavigateYourMarketing.com – an excellent alternative that will work very well for all our future onlie branding. Stay tuned…you will see more coming this week!
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