Yesterday .CO domain names became available to the public and is being marketed by domain name registrars, such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, that .CO could be universally recognized as “company”, “corporation” and “commerce”.
While you might not care what .CO stands for in your organization, it is a good idea to consider registering it to secure these domain names for the sake of domain name defensive registration. While its hard to predict the true popularity of this new top level domain, we still recommend registering .CO domain names in the near future.
(Photo credit: Stefan)
From a brand perspective you want to ensure that your desired web properties are registered to you. This goes to say that if you have a website (that you care about) you should own the .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains, if available.
The small investment made to register these is worth the type of image you want to present to those who may either mistype, or get re-directed from a search engine.
In the legal world, simply protecting your intellectual property, or trademarks, registering any domain names you can with your brand name in it is called defensive registration.
Whether you are a small business owner, or an executive at a large firm, it makes obvious sense that an investment as small as $10 and typically at the most $100 a year for a domain name makes sense. You want potential or current customers to land on your web property if they type in a domain name with your brand name in it.
(Photo credit: annaOMline)
Before July 1, 2010, you may want to renew your .com and .net domain names for a couple of extra years as the yearly registration price is scheduled to increase by about 7% after July 1.
VeriSign announced almost 6 months ago that it would be increasing domain name fees citing the need to increase the core infrastructure that supports the .com and .net top level domains.
This price increase might not hurt the pocket book that much if you own just a couple domains, but for those that have a size-able collection of .com and .net domains, it probably will be an obvious increase from the recent past.
Just a friendly reminder, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to jump on over to your favorite registrar, such as Namecheap, to renew for a couple more years before the price increase.
(The affiliate link above to Namecheap was included because we’ve found them to be a reputable domain registrar)
