Yes, you are operating a local business at a physical address but you also should be open to sales and business deals that someone or some organization that may approach you from the other side of the planet that results in business profits for you!

Not too long ago there was a business slogan, “operate globally, think locally.” The premise of this was to get your mindset open to sell to anyone on the planet while focusing on your local audience. Since the internet, there has been exploding opportunities for business to business profits between companies located anywhere in the world.

If you think you should only focus on branding your business locally, you should be happy to know that putting your domain name online, you automatically get your brand out to the world. The advantage of this is that you literally guarantee that your company name is “reserved” around the world as well. In the days before the internet, you would trademark your business name locally, not ever knowing if there was another business with the same exact name somewhere else in the world. Having your domain name reserved and using it online is the best way to make your brand known in the world. What better and practical way to “trademark” your name by just doing this!

Also, don’t forget to get a domain on your personal name too. This way, if you plan on making a personal blog or even extend your business brand with your own name, you have it to go online as you wish.

If your actual business name is taken, try adding “the” or “best”  in front of your business name or add some text at the end of your business name.

One of the best methods of coming up with a great domain name is to put your business name in front and end it with the city or town you are in. This even places more emphasis on the location of your business.

In any case, buy the domain name for at least 2 years. If you know you are planning on a long term strategy using your domain name, a lot of domain sites have discounts for 5 year registration of domain names. Take them up on the discount because the reality of it is that you are probably going to keep the name for a good long while.

After settling on your domain name, the next thing is to make sure all your advertising contains your domain name in the ad copy. This is where you “cross promote” your customers to know your domain name along with the physical address of your place of business.

A domain name goes a long way to brand your business and keep loyalty among your customers. Once they know your brand and you give them great service, your domain becomes a very valuable asset.

Branding could be as simple as getting a one page website up with your business name, address and contact information.

Of course, you’d be better with a full blown blog to brand youself. It is quick and easy to get a blog online about your business and the only other thing is to promote it. As mentioned before, make sure you insert at least twice a week, some new article or news about your business, your product or your industry.

I personally make a big mistake years ago when I discovered the importance of branding my business on the internet. It seems that someone beat me to having my “business name” online! At that time, my business name was taken weeks before I was searching for my new domain to start a new website for my business. So it forced me to think of another name, which I purchased the domain name for. Since then, I tell everyone that is not currently not online now to do a search for their business name and buy it and reserve it now!

This is all about branding. Once you have your domain purchased, you can always put up a website later. I can’t stress enough that your business be online, especially today. Having your business name on the internet is going to help you own the space you rightfully have the privilage of.

Once you get your feet wet on what to put up on the website, you will be on your way to open a new channel for business.

If you set up a blog on these platforms, you have a quick way of “testing” the waters whether you have the patience, acumen, and creativity to blog. Now I am not stating that you have to be professional publisher to start and keep up a blog.

Make note, though, that when you set up blogs on these free platforms, you run the risk of having no control of it because the blog host can delete your blog for any reason they see fit. Although I can’t state a specific instance of how your blog on these platsforms can get deleted, the most common one is if you violate the “terms of service” of the way you use the blog. Some free blog platforms do not allow you to sell products or services from the blog. Other platforms do not allow you to slander or libel other bloggers, people or organizations.

I can’t stress enough the value of being able to “test drive” the blogging process if you do set up blogs there. I would suggest that you blog, for a while on the free platform when starting out, just to get experience if you want to learn on your own. Then, when you get fairly comfortable, you can set up a “paid for” blog and take it seriously into the future.

What is a “paid for” blog system? Simply, it is a way where you buy your own domain name, “rent” webhosting, and download the blog software to the webhost. Domain names nornally cost about $10 and monthly webhosting costs as low as $5 per month. But the benefits are huge. You can sell products or services, and you can just about do anything you want on your own blogging platform that is legal and moral.

Since you control both the domain name and webhosting, there is little chance of being “shut down” from outside sources.

1) Make sure words within the domain name is relavent to the industry or niche that you are in. Search engines are going to “look over” your domain first to figure out where to place you in the search engine category and ranking.

For instance, if you are in the dog training business, your domain could be www . dog training tips . com

The search engines will look at each word for placement in the ranking system.

2) Make sure the name is “catchy” so people can easily remember the name. From a marketing standpoint, this is key to get out of the starting gate with a new blog.

3) Try to go for a short domain name. Nobody is going to remember a very long URL. It’s not going to “fit” in your business card! But seriously, a shorter domain name has proven to be more effective from a marketing standpoint.

If you follow these three key tips, your will have optimized your domain name for maximum marketing effect.

Beware of the domain “squatters” who are monitoring your domain name searches too. Once you input a possible domain name to purchase through a well know domain company, they purchase it if you do nothing to buy it in a day or so. If they find that they can get some serious money in “selling” it back to you, then are you literally held “captive” to buy from that company.

So when looking for a domain, make sure you can purchase it soon after you see it available if you feel it is the best choice for now. That way, you have peace of mind and you can start planning your website based around the name.

Deciding on a domain name is quite a simple process. First, you must make sure the domain name has your key word inside it that deals with your core business. Since our business deals with blogs and helping to market them, it was a natural to get our domain name, “Blog Marketing Experts.” It should be easy to remember. We have a recent post in which we let you in on some tools to help choose your domain name.

Next to posting relavent and exciting content in your blog, your domain name is the next best thing to help make your business blog a success.

First of all, you need to have a memorable domain name. In a perfect world, it should have a keyword or phrase of the type of industry your business is in. At the same time, it should be a short domain name. So there is a challenge of getting the right domain name, but you certainly can get some assistance here by going to a domain name suggestion site.

Here are some sites that can help you generate your own unique domain name:

1. www.makewords.com
2. www.shoutdomains.com
3. www.nametumbler.com

When a search engine looks at your blog, the first thing it will index is your domain name. The following things the search engines look for is meta tags, blog title, H1 and H2 tags, caption descriptions of your photos or videos, category words and phrases, and lastly the content in your posts. You can see, that if you give attention to all these items simultaneously, you will generate more visitor traffic to your site and therefore more leads that turn into paying customers.