Owning your own domain name is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to increase the professionalism of you and your business, virtually over-night. Understand that in network marketing, or any business for that matter, you are selling yourself.
In actuality, people are much more concerned with YOU, than they are about your network marketing business opportunity. I do not care if you have the greatest business in the world.
If you don't successfully position yourself as a leader in the eyes of your prospects, you will go no where.
With this in mind, understand that you are constantly being judged, sized up, measured, and compared to other potential up-line partners. People want to work with winners. They are attracted to leaders.
It is a survival instinct that is a part of our very DNA, and you cannot escape it. But you can also use this to your advantage! So what does all of this have to do with registering a little domain name?
Well it is simple. It's all about professionalism. If you do not even know how to register a simple domain name, how can you possibly expect other people follow you to financial freedom?
But there is much more to it than that. Having your own domain name is crucial for self-branding, tracking your advertising results, and ensuring that your prospects successfully make it to your site instead of someone else's, but after writing this guide, I realized there is much to this process than meets the eye.
Personally, I will spend hours and even days selecting the perfect domain name that meets all 5 of my exclusive criteria which allows me to find a domain that protects my brand from competition, pulls in maximum traffic from advertising, and gets listed in the top search engine rsults. (Just to name a few of the considerations I put into play).
Ok, enough of my soap-box chit-chat. I am glad you are here because we are going to completely change the image of your business in about 30 minutes, so let us get started!
95% of network marketers who actually register a domain name put very little thought into the actual domain selection process. Not me.
I will spend hours or even days selecting the right domain name because I am always thinking five steps ahead of the average business owner, and that is what I am going to teach you how to do as well.
Three reasons you need to own at least one domain name: First is the increased professionalism it gives to you. Having your own domain names does not necessarily put points in your professionalism column because it is an expected practice today.
But not having one, will definitely hurt your image.
Again, because having one is an expected practice today. Let's say that you were one of my cold market prospects and you did not know anything about me at all. I have your contact information, so I decide to send you a quick introductory email from my address which is: bigboymike429787@aol. (Not a real email address).
What would your first impression be? Do I sound like a professional business owner? A successful CEO? A leader?
Or do you picture some big college dropout making $8.00 delivering pizzas? The truth is irrelevant. I am being judged by that email address the instant it arrives in someone's inbox.
On the other hand, how would your perception change if my email address had my company name in it?
Now you are left with two options. The impression you get is going to be either positive due to the professional nature of the name, or neutral because the actual domain names themselves are neutral in meaning.
You can avoid negative stigmatisms because they are generic domains. The second advantage to having your own domain name is that you can now have a personal email address that is not dependant upon a 3rd part provider like AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Excite, or GMail.
If you have your own domain name, you can choose any address you would like, and the e-mail address will include your domain name.
Finally, the third advantage to owning a domain name is that you can use what is called a "redirect." In network marketing, we often use replicated website addresses or affiliate links in our businesses.
These are usually fairly long web addresses that are difficult to give out over the phone, or place in advertising pieces.
Most of the time your domain name will include numbers, phrases, and often your name. The bottom line is that it does not look professional. You are losing business just because of the web link itself.
Let me count the ways this will cost you. 1: Anytime you give someone your domain name or link with additional information in it like your name or ID number, people will automatically erase the extra part and go straight to the primary domain name just out of curiosity. It happens all of the time.
The bottom line is that you stand to lose out on that business. 2: You cannot put a website address like that in an advertisement of any kind. It means DEATH to your results.
Why? People are not going to remember the number at the end of your web address. Not only will people do exactly what I stated in #1 and leave your ID number
off so they can go to the primary site, but anyone who actually spends money on an advertisement, and does not even bother to set up a real domain name with a redirect obviously does not have a clue as to what they are doing.
Which means you will only attract leads who are even less savvy and less professional than the person who placed it. When I see an ad with a full link like that only one word comes to mind: "amateur." Which means I would not even bother responding to that ad for that reason alone.
3: You are just asking for trouble if you try and give out a long link like these to a prospect over the phone. Chances are they are going to spell it wrong or leave a piece out.
Try giving out a link like this on a conference call and you are going to lose professionalism along with all of the listeners who could not write it down correctly no matter how many times you were asked to repeat it.
URL Redirect. So like I said, the third advantage to owning your own domain name is that you can use what is called a "URL redirect", or "domain forwarding."
This simply means that you can instruct the company that is hosting your domain name to "redirect" all traffic coming to your domain (A), to site (B). This is like telling the post office to forward all of your mail to a new address because you just moved to a new home.
Instead of advertising your long link with your name, numbers and codes etc., you would instruct your hosting company to take all traffic coming to your catchy domain name (that you came up with) and have them sent to your long affiliate domain. That way you can market your catchy domain name.
Your "redirect" domain name that you come up with should have something to do with what it is you are selling. It should be easy to spell, say, write down, and remember.
If you don't have your own "redirect" domain name for your on-line business, you losing a lot of good customers and prospects to smarter competition.
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