Back in 2011 ICANN the regulator of the domain name industry approved a large expansion to the names of domain types available. That will certainly increase the competition in the market, but rather than using the brands created by others why not create your own?
All the new entrants to the domain market are looking for ways to generate business for themselves, whether it's the extra exposure of having their brand as part of your email address or website, or in the case of services like LinkedIn an opportunity to run paid advertising alongside your content.
The organisations behind the big brands on the internet are typically large US based corporations, think of Googe, Facebook, Ebay and Amzon. Why should we be building traffic for them and for the long term benefit of their shareholders? Think about yourself for a change. Build something for you, and just you.
How many of us have sons and daughter who spend hour after hour on social websites such as Facebook, don't get me wrong it's a great way to socialise, but if they spent the same amount of time investing in their own site imagine what they could build with those 100's of hours.
I would advocate trying to create your own brand, albeit on a small scale. Think about it? Why not see if your own full name is available, first name + Surname, it's unlikely that either on their own will be free, but both together might be. I recently registered a domain for my daughter jessicalawrence.com and to my surprise it was available. Over the years this could grow to be her brand, and potentially allow her to stay independent of third party branding. As she is only 5 years old at the time of writing there is plenty of time for her to develop the site!
A colleague of mind contributed for years to a leading web 2.0 property for years, invested several 100 hours creating content, only for one afternoon her account was suspended, for a minor policy violation and all those years of work, building up content, traffic and links to her sites was lost. If the same amount of effort had gone into her own website/brand then that could never have happened.
It is not just website policies that change, but the search engines themselves have a habit of changing the game abruptly, often website owners will not be able to adapt and close down, again leaving you as the one losing out.
This will be a slow and long term process but the rewards can be great. Many of our more successful clients have built popular blogs, for which they directly sell advertising, further cutting out their reliance on third party and the larger US brands.
There are plenty of reputable Domain Registrars around, our own company Discount Domains is an ICANN accredited registrar and a member of Nominet and we pride ourselves on offering helpful and friendly support.
If you need any advice about the selection of a domain, which you can use to create your own personal or corporate brand with, then give us a call today on 01952 288383 we always have ideas to share, and with more than 10 years of experience we have a good deal of expertise in knowing what is likely to work well.
Adrian Lawrence is the author of this article and is one of the webmasters at Discount Domains https://plus.google.com/u/0/106088322856862782725/posts
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