Domain names are the cornerstone of the internet. As the primary source of internet navigation, without domain names, your customers couldn’t get around and wouldn’t know how to find you. Also, domain names form part of a company’s identity and branding. Yet many companies make mistakes every day that can be extremely costly by not considering their domain name strategy carefully enough.

A web design error can be fixed. Software applications can be updated. But some domain name mistakes can stay with you a long time and could potentially cost your business a lot of money in lost trade or corrective measures.

Cheap Domain Names
If you have an online presence, consider the following five mistakes and see if you need to do more to protect your online assets.

1. Updating WHOIS information
Your domain name registration contains all the relevant information regarding the registered owner. But if this information is out of date, when your domain name is up for renewal, the notifications may never reach you. It is extremely common for a business to register a domain using one email address and then transfer all of their email activity to the new domain without updating the registration with the new email address.

If all your domain name administrative correspondence is going to your old, unused email address, you may not be aware your domain is about to lapse until it is too late. A lapsed domain can be a costly affair, as your website becomes inaccessible, and there is always the risk that someone else could register the domain before you realize.

Always ensure your registration information is up to date.

2. Registering in the Wrong Name
A common scenario is for a business manager to ask an employee to register company domains on their behalf. After all, managers are busy people. But be careful that the employee registers the domains under the company details and not under their own name.

Although it may not seem important at the time, as this certainly doesn’t affect the performance of the domain, if the employee leaves the company, you may find yourself unable to access or administer your own domains. Further, some employees are only too aware of the value of domains. If they are able to gain control of your domains and you part on bad terms, your website could suffer from the fallout as ownership is debated and transfers (sometimes expensive) are negotiated.

Always ensure all company domains are registered consistently under the correct name and with the one contact address. Never allow individual employees to register under their own name.

3. Not registering all the alternatives
You may think that if you only have one website, you only need one domain. But what if someone else registers all the other related domain names? For example, if you own xyz.com but someone else registers xyz.net, xyz.com.au, xyz.org, etc, many of your customers may find their way to these other websites instead of yours.

If at all possible, register all the domain names related to your brand, trademark or website and simply point them all to the same spot. Therefore, no matter which domain the visitor accesses, they arrive at the same place – you.

4. Not registering typo domains
Some domain names aren’t so easy to spell. If you have a domain name that can easily be misspelt, consider registering those domain names as well. A common trick amongst unscrupulous domain speculators is to register ‘typo’ domains for popular websites and fill them with advertising to catch the high amount of traffic that hits the wrong key.

For example, one commonly misspelt word is ‘restaurant’. If a domain name contains this word – and many do - it is advisable to register the most likely typo versions as well rather than risk losing customers.

5. Not keeping your domain management login information secure
The risk of hackers continues to increase with more websites having their home pages hacked or domain names commandeered. If a hacker were to take control of your domain name, they can point your reputable name towards a website of dubious content; spam advertising, phishing, internet viruses or simply steal your business.

To do so, they need to be able to hack your domain name passwords. Surprisingly, many companies still don’t have very secure procedures in place to safeguard their passwords.

Protect Your Online Assets

You wouldn’t leave the front door to your shop unlocked. Domain names are just as vital to your online business as a front door is to a high street shop. By planning a domain name strategy and protecting the ones you have, you can reduce the risks of a costly domain name nightmare.

How do you know if your domain name registration quote is the best deal? With prices varying from $25 to almost $150 in Australia for one two year domain, what should a sensible business consider when deciding on the right price to pay for their online identity?

The importance of choosing the right domain name can’t be stressed enough. After all, it is the name above your shop, the first words your customers will see. But beyond registering control of the domain so you can point it to your website, what else is there? Why does the same domain cost so much more when registered with one company instead of another?

Cheap Domain Names
In Australia, for example, the wholesale cost of registering a domain name is a cheap $19.50 + GST for a .com.au or .net.au. For other forms of domain; such as .org.au, .com, .info, etc, the fees vary and may be cheaper still. These prices are set by the local registries responsible for each region. Some of these domains may come with other restrictions. For example, auDA (The Australian Domain Administrator) restricts the registration of .com.au domains to businesses with a tax ABN number.

But you or I cannot register domain names at the wholesale price. We need to use accredited companies with the authority to register and administer domains on our behalf. The wholesale domain name price forms only part of the fee charged to you by this company. With additional fees for service, these additional costs can blow this $19.50 +GST into very different prices.

So when considering which company to go with to register your domain names, you will need to consider a number of other factors to determine the best deal.
Do you want telephone customer support or can you work with email contact only?

Some budget domain name companies are able to afford to keep their costs so low by keeping staff levels to a minimum. This means no telephone customer support and all customer contact is done by email. May be fine in most circumstances, but when you need help with more complicated issues, an email conversation can be difficult. Also response times are much slower. You may be waiting hours for the email response you need.
Do you want support 24×7?

If you’re like me, you do a lot of personal web projects over the weekend. But if I hit a snag and have to wait until business hours on Monday to reach customer support, it can put my project back a week. If you think you may need support outside of normal business hours, you may need to pay a little more.
Are you hoping to keep all your website transactions in one place?

Granted, some of the budget domain name companies have cheap prices, but are they capable of dealing with all your other website needs? If you have your web hosting, web design, SEO and other services elsewhere, it may be worth paying that little but extra to have the same company look after your domain names too. Having all your website components in one place can make rebilling and administration a lot easier and that can save money in the long run
Do you want an easy but comprehensive online interface to administer your domains?

It is reasonable to assume that the cheaper the domain name, the less money the business has to put into other customer service features. If you will be using your online control panel to administer your domain names, make sure it is one you are comfortable with and capable of achieving what you need. Remember, if you hit a problem with your online control panel with a cheap provider, as mentioned above, you may not be able to get customer service support when you need it.

Once you know what level of service you want with your domain name, you can then decide how much that is worth to you. By comparing companies with the level of service you need, you will soon identify which one is providing the best deal and which one is relying on ignorance to fuel their high prices.

U.S. dollar’s slide creates buying opportunities for domain names.

I first wrote about how the “cheap” U.S. dollar was affecting domain name prices back in April 2005. I wrote about it again in February of this year. Well, the dollar keeps falling and the effect is becoming even more apparent.

The Canadian dollar is now roughly on par with the U.S. dollar. People in North American are used to seeing two prices on books and magazines: A U.S. price and a slightly higher Canadian price. Now the two currencies are equal.

Cheap Domain Names
Other currencies, including the Euro and British Pound, have also appreciated against the U.S. dollar.

Consider a domain buyer in Europe. If he was willing to pay $100,000 USD for a domain 5 years ago, that would have cost him about EUR 100,000. Today, if he is still willing to pay EUR 100,000, that would equal about $142,000! Of course, if the domain still cost $100,000 then the buyer would be getting a good deal in his mind.

Here are the affects of the weak dollar on the domain market:

-Buyers outside the U.S. get “cheaper” domains or are willing to pay more
-Sellers in the U.S. have strong buyer demand from outside the U.S.
-Non-U.S. sellers find it harder to sell into the U.S. market

This isn’t just theory. It’s economics. When I was in New York for the SedoPro Partner Forum, I sat next to a domainer from Europe on the bus ride to the resort. He said his company was actively buying domains. I commented that he must be thankful for the strength of the Euro. His response: “That’s a big reason we’re buying right now”.

I’ve had quite a few non-U.S. domain companies contact me about advertising lately. Suddenly, a few hundred U.S. dollars on an add costs them a fraction of what it did a couple years ago.

U.S. domain owners should be thankful they have some of their money invested in domains rather than sitting in the weakening dollar. The domain investment portion of their portfolio is somewhat of a “hard asset” (yes, I just called a domain name a hard asset like real estate). As the dollar falls, the value of domains remains somewhat stable — if not growing — on a global scale.

Do you have to pay a big bucks for names to make big profits on them? No. Are the only good names already taken and do you have to bid them up at dropcatchers to get them? No. Decent names abound at low prices and can even still be hand registered.

Cheap Domain Names
To illustrate, in the last week, I sold seven names. All were purchased in the last year. Three were hand registered and four were picked up at tdnam for $5 to $15 dollars, plus registration fee. What did I gross on those names? $5,240.

That’s $92 turned into $5,240, less Sedo or escrow.com fees.

And, I didn’t have much risk with these names as they were so inexpensive. Don’t get me wrong, I do buy more expensive names as well, having paid up to a several thousand dollars for a name. And I’d certainly be willing to pay $50,000 - $100,000 or more for a truly great name. But, when names get into that price range, they are invariably on a major dropcatcher’s site and there are tool many fools there spending their money like it’s 1999 in the tech bubble stock market again. No way I’m going to hang on to millions of dollars of names in a market that could bust (or change) when you least expect it. And we could likely be going into a housing led recession by next year and that will effect all investment markets…but I digress. Am I missing out on making the million dollar hit? Of course. But I do that in other business ventures, not this little hobby.

There are many thousands of dollars to be made by thinking differently, not chasing keywords everyone is chasing, being well-read and opportunistic, being a good negotiator, and most of all using your intuition — if you have it.

The web and its domains can be a very profitable place. So profitable, in fact, that some less than scrupulous people with brains have figured out a way to tap into the whois databases to see which domain names are being searched. What happens then? If you do a search for a potential domain name for your future website, and don’t register it immediately, it can be snatched out from under you within minutes.

Cheap Domain Names
This activity was first reported on The Daily Domainer in October, with pretty full details of what to do and not to do. Apparently the Network Solutions database is the one that’s been tapped into, according to comments on that post.

ICANN, without admitting there actually IS a problem, is looking into it, and asking for public comment from both registrars and registrants who have had issues and suspect this activity is going on. Here’s the report on ICANN security in pdf form.

Ars Technica has this to say about Domain Front Running and ICANN’s reaction to it:

ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) likens the practice to stock and commodity front running . . . While the practice is illegal when it comes to stocks and commodities, it is much more cloudy when it comes to domain names. ICANN recognizes the lack of regulation covering this area and makes it clear that a stronger set of standards needs to be established. “ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement and Registry Agreements do not expressly prohibit registrars and registries from monitoring and collecting WHOIS query of domain name availability query data and either selling this information or using it directly,” writes the SSAC. “In the absence of an explicit prohibition, registrars might conclude that monitoring availability checks is appropriate behavior.”

Even worse, Verisign, one of the major root name server operators, has made noise about offering lookup data for sale. It’s bad enough it can be done at the ISP level, but doing it from aggregate nameserver level could be devastating to anyone who wishes to register a domain name. None of us wants to pay $1000 or more to a “scalper” for something we should be able to register for under ten bucks. The integrity of the system should be a given, and the deal with the devil that is Verisign made by ICANN a year or so ago is going to bring everyone headaches.

So, how do you safely search and register a domain name? First of all, don’t use the browser location bar to search domain names since that information, in the form of unsuccessful DNS queries, is collected by the ISPs and the sale of that information, to domain speculation companies, is a profit base for them.

Secondly, don’t use Network Solutions, at least not until they’ve been declared clean. Interestingly enough, Jon Nevett, Vice President of Policy at Network Solutions, made a comment on the CircleID blog that admits there’s a problem, so much as I’m not crazy about them based on my own experiences with them, I don’t think they’re intentionally dirty, but are instead dealing with being hacked. There are some other suspect registrars, with GoDaddy being a name that has come up more than once when this subject of Domain Front Running comes up. Personally, their domain name auction and “reservation” activity (reserving a domain name that is about to expire, at a huge markup) would make them suspect to me. It all just smacks of conflict of interest, but that’s admittedly my opinion. There are other registrars which have been mentioned as problematical.

Third, use a reputable registrar. This may still not be enough to save your domain name, but it can help, since they wish to keep that good rep by keeping their security high. Make sure you’re logged into their secure area when searching.

Fourth, when you find a domain name you like that’s available, have your credit card at hand and REGISTER IT IMMEDIATELY. My registrar allows me to deposit funds prior to purchase so I don’t have to wait for a credit card transaction to be approved in order for the registration to go through, which saves time and possibly saves the domain name, and so far (knock on wood) I haven’t had a problem. I usually have at least one domain name’s worth of funds in there at any one time, in case inspiration strikes.

Fifth, though there are occasions when you’re going to be beat out of a domain name legitimately, it won’t hurt to report any suspect instance to the World International Property Organization, who is trying to aggregate data on possible instances of Domain Name Front Running. So if you do lose a domain name in the minute or two between the search and the processing of the transaction, please do report it. If certain domain owners keep showing up again and again in this regard, then WIPO will have some evidence with which to approach ICANN. I would also suggest dropping a comment to ICANN if this happens. Include as much information as possible when communcating with WIPO and ICANN- When lookup was accomplished and through who, who ended up with the domain, and any communication with the subsequent domain owner.

Domain names aren’t immediate online identities these days. They are the most vital piece an online business owns.

Cheap Domain Names
Many businesses are eliminated simply because the owner came upon on a popular quality domain name. These people are mining currency like crazy and many reuse this money to erect superior businesses.

If you have invested in stocks you know that bad news can utterly change the value of any stock. Why not put your money into online domain names that are moderately trouble free and easy to get a hold of.

For the every day web junkier, the phrase “domain name” really doesn’t mean that much, but without that, everyone would have an extremely hard time browsing the net. The Domain Name System or DNS is used in much the same way that a phone system is used. The only differnce is that Domain Names are based electronically.

When your crowding the net, you’re using the DNS and not even apprehending it. Most likely not knowing whats technically going on.

Today citizens are starting to use mass domain names for a wide selection of money making oppurtunities that are rising as we speak. At the center stage of trouble-free no employment profit is affiliate programs.

Domain name holders or webmasters can come up with a straightforward domain name that can sell nothing and yet still make an amazing profit from the way the website is created and the way yahoo domain names are used.

By the power of affiliate programs, any person that holds a yahoo domain name or many yahoo domain names, may certainly use that site to make trouble-free money. It really works, if you hold many yahoo domain names and have easy web sites with affiliate programs prepared on every site you may very well earn yet a larger profit.

Go one step further. Build one site and have it hosted on many yahoo domain names. Have all the affiliate programs in position ready to earn you a killing!

When you finally own your yahoo domain names and you have your site being hosted all you have to do is just supply links to other web sites that are wanting to pay you for the traffic that your giving them. Buy one or ten yahoo domain names.

Make some sites that are a component of affiliate programs, link exchanges or whichever of the countless cash for traffic programs. Then cash in!Mass yahoo domain names are very simple to get your hands on!

Despite the pervasive groaning and head-scratching when it comes to trying to think up “.com” domain names that remain available, it’s still possible to find great domain names by using creative naming tactics.

Even in a highly competitive industry, you can think up original, appealing domain names for businesses by using the following five naming tactics that few people use:

Cheap Domain Names
1. Focus on results. What is the outcome or end result that people want to have from buying a certain product or service? How do they feel when they have finished the transaction?.

2. Look for puns. Make a list of relevant keywords, say each out loud and play around with the sounds. Puns are much less likely than other kinds of names to have been registered because their component parts are not actual words.

3. Think slang. Let your imagination and memory fly around for pleasing-to-the-ear expressions.

4. Go symbolic. Suppose you’re an expert on the horror genre and want to start a paid online community for horror fans. Horrorific.com, horrorgate.com and Horrornet.com are all taken, but as of today, the less obvious and more vivid FrightFox.com is not.

5. Vary real words. “Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes,” says the Press Center of the world’s most successful search engine. “The word was coined by the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner,” it continues – providing another hint for creative naming: consult a kid.

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