Purchase Your Domain Name To Secure Your Personal Brand

  • 1 min read

Get Your Domain Name or Lose

I tell people all the time to purchase theirname.com, but few still take the initiative. You need to secure your eBrand these days or it will come back to bite you. There are billions of people in this world and many share the same name (John Smith, etc). This means that once an alarm goes off in their head, they will purchase their domain name ahead of the others. When this happens, they get placed first in Google and have protected their reputation. Everyone else, has to find creative domain name strategies that STILL won’t be as strong in search engines. Listen, there are people who are in the “personal brand domain name” business as we speak. These people are viewing a lot of us that are becoming ever more popular in the social media front. They will buy our names and then sell it back to us when we have a large audience and become celebrities. Do you really want to spend $50,000 to claim your domain 5 years from now? If you do, then tell me your name and I’ll sell it to you.

Are you still not convinced? You asked for it! (Case Study)

Shel Israel is one of the most prominent bloggers on the internet. He co-authored Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble and was a trusted advisor for many startups that needed strategic communications help. Currently, he is the host of Global Neighbourhoods on FastCompany.tv, which covers enterprise and trends in social media.

ShelIsrael.com. Now your saying to yourself “Shel must have bought his own domain because he is very web savvy and has been in this space for years.” Shel has been building his personal brand for a while now, starting with the book and his blog and now FastCompany, but he never secured his eBrand. His “super stardom” came with haste and he disregarded that he would become a larger target to people who either disliked his brand or his content. I really like Shel, but we must learn from this mistake.

Reputation DISASTER. As your brand grows, more people are attracted to it, in a positive or negative way. If you have no “disbelievers” then you haven’t succeeded at a high enough level. Loren Feldman discovered that Shel didn’t register www.shelisrael.com and quickly purchased it for less than $10 (No excuses people). Loren created an entire website that makes fun of Shel, with podcasts, where there is a puppet interviewing tech guru’s. You ask “why would he waste his time doing all of this”? Simple, it’s because Shel already has a large audience and there are more people like him who aren’t keen on the Shel Brand. He’s been receiving over 10K hits because he’s tapped into what’s already popular (Shel). The podcasts are somewhat funny if you’ve ever met Shel, skimmed his blog posts or watched his podcasts, but obviously I don’t think Loren is very ethical.

Call to Arms. Please (I’m begging you) purchase your domain name right now. Visit Godaddy.com and on the top part of the screen type your first and last name (no spaces) and conduct a search. If it’s taken, try .net first and then .org. If everything is taken, then do what John Moore did and purchase your full name, including your middle name.

Picture of Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. He is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin’s Press) and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan Publishing), which combined have been translated into 15 languages.

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