Domain names are too common that those even seven year old demands to have one to run a personal blog. Schools are motivating students to blog too. Obviously, the need for content sharing and management grows from educational purpose to business. With exponential growth in online industry, domain names with .com are selling like hot cake. We may not be able to get 3-5 letters domain from .com anymore. Also, it is the most common globally recognizable top level domain (TLD) that gets higher demand each day. Either for blogging or business, we should get our own private domain before having a presence in online. Let us explore the pros and cons of not having own domain name.
Some may say that with existence of several social networking tools like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc; we don’t really need another specific domain to represent us or our business. Basically, we use social bookmark network tools to promote our business or blog to get more visitors and add some valuable comment or support our ventures. We don’t really have the full ability to control contents on those top social network sites. We should abide their rules and regulations while limiting ourselves with 140 characters on Twitter, 3k friends in Facebook, etc. You may also use free blogging platform like wordpress.com, blogspot.com, etc to manage your contents. There is risk of complete deletion of your blog in this network if any one of your submission or activity conflict with their TOS.
There are some cost involved in getting private domain name and hosting to run our own site. If we compare the packages available 10 years ago and now, things got cheaper on either hosting or domain. There are some providers willing to give free hosting (ad free) if you purchase a .com domain worth of $10/year. Running some Google ads code on your blog can earn you more than that in a year which can cover all your domain and hosting cost. Now, you will have an opportunity to run your own domain privately hosted to support your ranting, ramblings, diary, business, etc. This shows that you are serious about being presence in online. In time, you will slowly build trust and value to your own domain name.
Let’s say you like to talk about pets and love sharing information to your friends with a blog. You are actually adding value to your blog by posting contents to it. Of course, you would love to read other articles about pet and leave a comment (reference to your name and blog). This will add more value to your domain in terms of back links. In a few years time by continuously adding new contents and building back links to your blog from pet related sites, you have made your blog into a money making machine. You are actually doing SEO for your blog without even realizing it. This blog can make you three to four figure incomes derived from advertisements in long run.
Similar to real estate industry where you invest a whole sum of money in purchasing a new property expecting rental income in return, blogging can also turn into solid monthly income. The only difference here is you spend $10 to get your address to start. You can also sell your blog for a good amount in short time. There are sites like Flippa that can find buyers who are willing to pay even six figures for niche related sites that is established and earning. If you can earn $1k/month from your blog, then your blog value is simply between 10 times to 20 times of your monthly income ($10k-$20k). Not bad for a few years blog that you manage part time writing about your favorite topic (pets). You can’t do this on sub-domain from .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com blogs because you are not the sole owner. Google or WordPress own them and no one have the right to sell their blog to others. This is a strong reason why we should get a domain name.
Other than that, private domain helps to create brand awareness. We may not have a business name to start now, but we can create our own name as a brand name. There could be millions of person with John David name but only one person can own Johndavid.com domain name. Why not you book get your own name before someone else with your name takes the ownership of your name. Once you able to book your name promote your services or interest using your own domain name. This could be a diary for your children or grandchildren to read about you and your endeavors.
Check out the interesting answer given by Google Spam team head Matt Cutts in his recent video asking questions; “How would you bootstrap a business if you were given 10 pounds?”
We have always heard so much on domain names and why is it so important to be very careful at the time of choosing one but this is the first time i have come across a post that comprehensively discusses about domain name and why do we need one.The video further enhanced the post. Awesome post.Also,special thanks for the examples.