Inferior Domain Name Could Ruin Your Online
Business
Since every website needs a domain name, following are the top ten most common
mistakes made by online business owners:
1. Buy a .net instead of a .com, and send 10% of your repeat customers
to your competitor who owns the .com.
2. Use a number in your domain name, such as 1Widgets.com, but not own
the spelled OneWidgets.com.
3. Since you are a great company, expect customers to remember a long
domain name such as WorldsGreatestComputerCompany.com. This is also
using a tag line as a name.
4. Give customers two opportunities to forget your name. Expect your
customers to remember your company name, “World’s Greatest Computer
Company,” and also expect customers to remember that your website is
your initials WGCC.com.
5. Admire a famous company or a clever name, such as eBay, by using a
slightly different name. Spend your startup capital and time on a
trademark legal battle.
6. Make up a new word, such as Viagra, but don’t spend millions on
marketing to make the new word a household word, and expect your
customers to remember the new coined word anyway.
7. Assume a name that worked for your brick-and-mortar store will also
work just as well for your online store, when most customers
remembered your brick-and-mortar store by your location, (the bike
store at the shopping center).
8. Make customers think if your website is Widget.com (singular) or
Widgets.com (plural) and send those who guess wrong to your
competition.
9. Choose a popular word such as “American” in AmericanWidgets.com and
wait for one or more of the 10,000 other companies named American to
sue you for trademark infringement.
10. Register your domain name for just 1 year
instead of the maximum of 10 years, and then
forget to renew the domain name when it expires
the following year. You end up losing the domain
name to some cyber squatter who took over your
domain and demand large amount of money
from you if you want to get it back.
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