You’ve got yourself an amazing product or service. You have yourself an amazing business plan. You’ve even got the perfect name for your brand. You’re all ready to get your company off the ground, right? Wait a second. There’s all-important step yet to be taken in order to truly launch your business. You need a website! And the first step to getting a website is choosing a domain name.
Of course, the decision to select a domain name for your brand may seem like a no-brainer. However, not all business names make for good domain names. For instance, your business name may be too long. You don’t necessarily want to be turning Big John’s Sporting Goods and Equipment Centre into part of a URL. So what steps should be taken to ensure you choose the perfect domain name for your brand?
1. Make it short and sweet. The shorter your domain name is, the easier it is going to be for your customers to remember it. That isn’t to say that it should only be a couple of letters in length. But you’re going to want your website address to be a concise, catchy and memorable one. It’s important, as well, to make sure that your domain name is fairly easy to spell and pronounce.
2. Be original. There are so many domain names out there that you may run the risk of selecting one that is too similar to another one that is already in existence. Not only do you not want to violate another company’s intellectual property, but you want to be able to stand out from all of the other sites out there. Consider the originality of your domain name so that it stands for something special.
3. .Com or .Ca? It probably goes without saying that in North America, .com website addresses are the most popular. Arguably, they’re also the easiest to say and remember. However, many Canadian business owners are finding great benefit in going with the Canadianized .ca web addresses. Our advice? Buy both and have them direct to one another. That way, you can’t lose!
4. Pick a strategy. How do you want people to find you? Will you be relying on traffic from search engines? If so, you’ll want to select real phrases and words that people are likely to Google. Will you be advertising your new website address? Silly question, most likely, but if so, you’ll want to make sure that your special turn of phrase or made up word becomes one that the public gets quickly familiar with. MeloTel.com is an example! (Sorry, it’s taken).
5. Get creative. You may just have to come up with your own newly created word after all. MeloTel, as you may have guessed, is combination of “Melo” from our company president and founder, John Meloche’s last name, and “Tel” for telephone – the device and service that got our company’s engine running. We’re not the only company to come up with a company and domain name in this way. Ever hear of YouTube?
MeloTel makes it easy for you to discover if your domain name is available. On our Managed Domain, Email & Web Hosting page, you can easily type in the domain names of your choice to check on their availability. You’ll also notice that we have three awesome plans to get your website registered and on its way to making your company the success you envisioned it to be. Let’s get you set up! Give us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL.