Creating a domain strategy should be one of the first things you do when developing an overall digital marketing strategy for your organization and building your brand online.

Choosing a domain name is hard.

Organizations should make sure that they purchase multiple top level domains (TLDs) so that they all point to one primary domain name.

If it wasn’t hard already, there are now 882 domain extensions with the recent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announcement of more than 500 new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) introduced into the Internet. And there are nearly 84,000 new domain names registered every day.

What does this all mean?

If your company primary domain name has a .com TLD, they should also purchase the domain rights to .org, .net, .mobi, .biz, .jobs and .info and explore the new domains based on your industry and topics you cover on your website.

You should also purchase some misspellings of your original domain name to make sure that your audience gets to your website.

Learn how to choose the perfect domain name.

For example, type in yahoo.org, yahoo.biz, yahoo.info into your web browser.

Do they all direct you to yahoo.com?

Yes.

If you type in yahooo.org with the extra ‘o’ do you get directed to yahoo.com?

Yes.

Yahoo is a great example of a company that successfully implements a domain strategy with multiple TLDs. Learn how to choose the right domain name and places to find domain names.

Why should you care? 

One of the best mainstream examples of how a domain issue can affect organizations is the whitehouse.com controversy.

If were trying to go to the White House website and type in whitehouse.com, you won’t find out about President Obama’s latest press conference.

You’ll need to instead go to whitehouse.gov.

A web page designer purchased whitehouse.com first and made it an adult site.  (It has since been changed to another site.)  This Whitehouse.com goes porn article summarizes this controversy well and the URL is now defunct.

So do you want your organization’s clients and prospects go to a site that is not affiliated with your organization?

Worse yet, do you want to your audience (who may be young children) to encounter adult content instead of your content?

A cybersquatter took advantage of the popularity of the White House to promote his content.  Do you want your organization to fall victim to this too?

To learn more about the benefits of why your organization should purchase multiple TLDs and point them to one domain, you should read about the advantages of multiple TLD registrations and why you should register multiple domain names.

What is your domain strategy?

Does your organization have a domain strategy? What tips would you add? What new domains did you purchase?