Entrepreneur Magazine Publishes Do’s and Don’ts of Buying Domain Names

In an interesting post this morning titled, Do’s and Don’ts of Securing a Domain Name Entrepreneur Magazine provided their tips to business owners in the market for a good domain. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by the article as it hit some pretty solid points that the mainstream media usually misses.

Want to know the first item on Entrepreneur’s “Do” list? Pick a geo-targeted or exact-match keyword domain. Seriously, I want to pat the guy on the back who wrote this article, this is such an important quality that amazingly gets overlooked all the time. If you run a local business, get the city in your domain if you can, if you run a category buy the category-killer domain.

It’s also interesting to see their emphasis on .com which I think is spot-on. In the article they say: Don’t: Waste money on extensions other than .com. Bam! No beating around the bush there, and I think it’s a good thing they are doing here. The article discusses other TLDs like .net and .org for brand protection but do focus on the importance of owning a .com. Heck that section even ends with – “The value is really in the .com.”

The article also caught important issues like avoiding numbers and dashes. I always cringe when I see a business get their name with the numbers 123 appended to the end! This is a good sign for the industry, mainstream media is starting to understand domain names better than they ever have. I think this is a great article to refer to end-users so they can better understand what qualities to look for a in a good domain for their brand.

Feel free to share your own Do’s and Don’ts in the comments section – you can find my person list below! Comment and let your voice be heard!

DO buy an exact match domain name whose keywords have a search volume over 1,000 (exact-match global)

DO buy a domain that has been registered for more than a year that has some existing traffic/revenue

DO stick to .com

DON’T try to hand-register the perfect domain, you’ll end-up settling for your 10th favorite option

DON’T buy a domain name for thousands of dollars with Pay Pal

DON’T park your domains and expect to get rich

In case you haven’t had a chance to read the article yet you can read it here

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton