How To Safeguard Your Business Brand Name Online

Have you come up with a great idea for a brand new online business venture? Do you already have an existing online presence that you are trying to grow?

If you have been trying to build a business online for a while now, then you know that building a business brand online requires a whole lot more than just choosing a great domain name, designing a great logo and building a great looking website. These are very important, of course, but there’s a whole lot more to it.

In this article, I’ll show you a couple of really effective, simple-to-implement and extremely inexpensive strategies that you can put into place right now to safeguard your business presence online (you will be really glad you did this as your business grows in months and years to come!) …

How To Safeguard Your Business Brand Name Online

Let’s say that you have come up with a terrific name for a new business venture and you want to take it online.

Generally, one of the first steps many savvy entrepreneurs would take, would be to check and see if a domain name that matches your business name is available.

Domain names have become so important in the way we do business today, that any new business owner (including your potential future competitors) would need to seriously consider whether or not to register a business name if the domain name associated with that business name is not available.

Think about it. Would you go through the trouble of setting up a business called “Best Green Solutions” if all variations of its associated domain (e.g. bestgreensolutions.com, bestgreensolutions.net, bestgreensolutions.com.au, best-green-solutions.com, etc.) were already registered by someone else and belonged to another business?

Probably not. What would be the point? Your marketing dollars and hard work to promote your business online would most likely only end up benefiting someone else. As an online business strategist, I regularly work with business owners here in Australia who have registered a .com.au domain, but not the .com version of the same domain.

Invariably, when I do a quick check for the client, I’ll see that the domain name has already been registered by someone else. What this means, is that if a visitor is not sure about the business name and they type in the .com domain address instead of the .com.au address, they will end up in someone else’s site. Someone else is benefiting from the traffic and my client’s marketing efforts.

This may not seem like a big deal to some, but it is something that is not only easily preventable as the rest of this article will show, but can also help you avoid major problems later on, especially if your business starts to become very successful, or you market a product that could easily be sold internationally.

With this in mind, here are a couple of really simple and inexpensive strategies we recommend for safeguarding your business brand name online:

Strategy #1: Secure All Related Domain Names Associated With Your Brand

I assume you already have a domain name registered for your business. If you haven’t, go here for FREE video tutorials on how to quickly search for available keyword-rich domain names, and how to register a domain name.

Okay then … have you thought about safeguarding your business brand name online by registering the main multiple variations of your existing domain name?

Some of the most common strategies used to do this include:

• Register the .com, .net and .org versions of your domain (e.g. mygreenstore.com, mygreenstore.net, mygreenstore.org)
• Register your domain internationally (e.g. mygreenstore.com.au, mygreenstore.co.uk)
• Register both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of your domain (e.g. mygreenstore.com, my-green-store.com)
• Register a number of keyword-rich domains related to your business (e.g. yourmainproductcategory.com, mainkeywordrelatedtoyourbusiness.com, etc.) – you can then use these to build separate sites focused on niches in your industry and drive targeted traffic to your main web site, or develop these into separate business divisions.

Registering multiple domains related to your business is fairly inexpensive (most domains cost less than $12-$15 per year to maintain) and offers several benefits and advantages, such as:

• It gives you a local / global monopoly over the brand.
• It prevents competitors from securing those domains and diverting traffic to their sites.
• It stops people registering business names offline that are similar or related to your domain.
• It can significantly increase the resale value of your business.

Now … you may be wondering what to do with all of those domains after you have registered them. The simplest thing to do is to redirect all visitors to those domains to just one domain … i.e. your main business domain. There are a couple of really simple ways to do this:

• You can park your domain on top of another domain
• You can add some code to a file that will redirect your visitors to your main domain

Redirecting domains is very easy to do. If you have already subscribed to our training updates, you will receive tutorials shortly on how to redirect domains. If you haven’t subscribed to our training newsletters, go here to register now (and get instant access to over 50 FREE WordPress Training Video Tutorials as soon as you register)

For example, I currently own the domain name biggreenweb.com. I also registered a number of related top level domains to safeguard the brand name associated with the online business, including:

BIGGREENWEB.NET
BIGGREENWEB.ORG
BIGGREENWEB.BIZ
BIGGREENWEB.INFO
BIGGREENWEB.COM.AU
BIGGREENWEB.CO.UK
BIGGREENWEB.CO.NZ
BIGGREENWEB.US

I then redirected those domains, so they all point to the main domain at biggreenweb.com. If you type in any of the above domains into your browser, you will be taken to www.BigGreenWeb.com.

We recommend using GoDaddy to register your domains. GoDaddy is not only an affordable and highly trusted domain registrar, but they also provide an excellent domain name management system that makes it super easy to manage multiple domain names.

Go here to register your domains: GoDaddy.

STRATEGY #2: SECURE WEB2.0 USERNAMES

Since its inception, the internet has undergone many significant changes. One of these is the increasing relevance and dominance of social media sites like FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter and dozens of other social networks and bookmarking sites.

Establishing an online presence in these major social networks is important not only in terms of creating a growing awareness for your business with the online community, but also in terms of generating new sources of traffic, which you can then turn into new customers for your products and services.

We will discuss social media strategies for growing your business online in future articles, but for now, all you need to do is secure your brand name with as many of these sites as you can before someone else takes it.

Generally this is easily done by simply creating an account and choosing a username that visitors can associate with your business, e.g.:

• facebook.com/mybusinessname
• twitter.com/mybusinessname
• youtube.com/mybusinessname
• etc…

You can check to see if your desired username is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites by visiting this site:

http://namechk.com/

Type in your desired username or vanity url and click the button to check its availability at dozens of the most popular social networking and social bookmarking sites …

And a list of all sites where the username is still available is instantly returned …

Tips For Unique Or Trademarked Business Names

What if your business name is a unique or trademarked name?

Well, the same advice applies as was given earlier … secure all related domain names associated with your business name and create as many accounts as you can at all the major social networking and social bookmarking sites using your unique username.

Additionally, there is one more strategy we recommend if you want to drive more traffic to your site and grow your business presence online … register keyword-rich domains related to your main products or services.

I briefly mentioned this earlier in this post, but let’s just look at it in a little more detail.

For this example, let’s say that your business name is something like Gloopster.com and one of the products you sell is recycled seat covers. Although your name is unique and has a fun ring to it, it is meaningless to both the search engines and most online users searching for recycled seat covers who have never heard of you.

The suggestion here, then, is to see if the domain recycledseatcovers.com (or recycled-seat-covers.com) is available, and if so, you should consider registering it, then either redirecting it to the recycled seat covers section of your main website (e.g. gloopster.com/recycledseatcovers), or building a site specifically related to information about recycled seat covers and focusing on attracting visitors interested in purchasing recycled seat covers to it.

Hopefully this article has helped you see how you can start protecting your business brand name online easily inexpensively while also preventing your competitors from taking some of your market share or benefiting from your online marketing efforts.