Creating your website/blog with your domain(Yourname.com) will give you more credibility with your customers, investors, vendors and employees. You’re letting people know who you are, which creates a unique relationship, allowing them to trust you. By putting yourself out there, you are taking the brand of your business to a whole new level.
Using KirkTaylor.com(you will use yourname.com), I attract people who are curious as to what I am doing next. The same goes for new entrepreneurs as their friends want to keep up with what is happening in their life. Friends, family and fans will tell others when you put more detail into your site. You can’t help but become famous online if you just are willing to put yourself out there.
I have had my domain since 2000; however, I never really used it until recently. The reason is that I didn’t want to be the brand. Now, I am quickly finding out that was a huge mistake. I would struggle to establish credibility with my old sites. When people would visit they would often leave on the first page, but now, unbelievably, my bounce rate is running at less than 4/100’s of a percent! My writing is consistent with other content while adding the personal relationship. You can accomplish what you want using yourname.com in your website.
My other domains do not index as well, and now I have more credibility and a higher rank using KirkTaylor.com.
The offline marketing is easier as well when you can tell people that your name is your site. They won’t forget and are more likely to visit. They want to know more about you.
By now you should be ready to get “yourname.com” and register it now. I highly recommend using Namecheap.com to register your domain. The customer service has been fantastic, and once you get the hang of it, managing the domain is easy as well.
Before you do register your name, keep in mind that I am going to recommend a different web hosting company. You don’t need to buy email accounts, or hosting services from Go Daddy as we will be setting up your blog site elsewhere.
How to register yourname.com
To register the domain, click on Go Daddy and you will go to the front page where you can enter your name in the search box located in the upper right-hand corner. You will get either a result that your name is available or has already been secured by someone else. In the event it has been taken, there will be other suggestions to use different variations of your name.
For now, don’t be too picky, and select one that is as simple as possible. It is more important to take action and get on to the next step. If we need to, we can come back and review different variations of yourname.com later on, but we have to have a domain name before moving forward.
Once you have found an available domain, you will need to follow the checkout process which is fairly self-explanatory especially if you can find the “skip extras and proceed to check out the link.” We just want to get your domain registered right now.
You may want to consider one feature, however, and that is private registration, which hides your email address and personal contact information in public “whois” section. You will avoid getting a ton of spam by following this process.
Go Daddy allows you to maintain 100% ownership of your domain, as long as you are current on registration fees which are negligible. You always have the option to transfer the domain, point it to a different location, or even sell it to someone else.
Would you like to have your own blog? Check out my free WordPress blog setup here.