The Importance of Owning Your-Own-Name.com

Do you work in the tech industry? How about an online publication? Maybe you are an avid Internet surfer or a gadget guru? No matter who you are, there is probably good reason for you to brand yourself on the Internet. Or if you don’t want to brand yourself, you may as well reserve your brand. “In what fashion.” say you? By buying your own FirstnameLastname .com domain.

Since I work directly in the domain name industry, I know firsthand the importance of branding a website, a publication, or a business. The name of a business/website/etc. can make or break an entity.

Take for example some of the blogs out there on the Internet. Most people these days go to some-blog-service.com, sign up for a blog. The service then issues a subdomain for that blog (such as seanstafford.some-blog-service.com.)

The subdomain is functional, and it does brand you to a degree. However, it also may cause confusion or a mistype when inputted into the URL bar. And since the ultimate goal for your blog/website is to get people to visit it, you are making it harder for your visitors to actually reach you. Why would they type in YourFirstNameLastName.some-blog-service.com when they expect to see your site at www.YourFirstNameLastName.com?

Registrars such as NameCheap.com, Moniker.com, and GoDaddy.com provide a service for domain registration at very reasonable fees. And by “reasonable” I mean in the ten dollar range or less.

One of the huge tragedies I see in today’s online world is people who use their names as income (writers, journalists, etc) forgetting or not appreciating how important domain names really are. One of the biggest assets a writer or journalist has is his name, yet does he own his-name.com?

I recently had the pleasure of getting to meet a number of journalists at a party that I attended over the holidays. After they inquired about my profession, I asked a lot of them if they owned their own FirstnameLastname.com domain. Much to my surprise, I found that one, only one, had registered his name. And when I asked the others why they had not registered their own names, they told me they did not think it important.

This is the question I always ask when I get that response: “Would you believe it to be important if someone else registered your FirstnameLastname.com and then put offensive material on it for the world to see”? Example: A malicious person could register the name of a local, but well known person and put ads on it that were offensive. Now, every time someone searches in Google for info about this well known person, this offensive site comes up somewhere in the search results. Although this probably (hopefully) would not cause major damage, it certainly does not help the person affected and will also probably cause major confusion for the visitor. It may also cause the loss of a reader, client or advertiser for the organization the person works for.

Do you think the above is unlikely? Well it is more likely than most would like to believe. The objective of the malicious person described is to extort money from the victim. Once a newscaster, journalist, writer, or otherwise well known person (maybe industry wide, locally, or nationally well known) sees this type of material on his FirstnameLastName.com, more than likely he will be concerned. And a lot of the time, the victim will be willing to do or pay whatever necessary to have this offensive material go away. There are legal avenues available to remedy situations like this, but they aren’t quick, and they are usually not cheap.

So, what is the best way to protect yourself against this? Register your own domain name! Now, it also needs to be noted that sometimes it is not going to be possible to obtain your own FirstnameLastname.com domain. Domains such as “johnsmith.com” and “billjones.com” or any other common name were probably registered long ago. In that case, you can always go for the .net or maybe another extension. But if your .com name is available for registration, it is a travesty for you not to do so.

So maybe you are a journalist, writer, locally famous person, or maybe just an avid internet guru who would like to reserve your brand for future use. At a price point of 10 dollars or less a year, it just makes sense! After all, the only thing we really have is our name.

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