Tips on buying a domain name

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Hello, I'm Lynda from Scullywag Services and 
I'd like to talk to you about domain names.  

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So a domain name is just your website address. 
So, for example, my domain name is scullywag.com.  

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If you go to a website browser and type in 
scullywag.com, it takes you to my website. If you  

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don't already have a business name or a brand name 
you might be thinking... hmm what am I going to  

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do? What will I call myself? What do I want people 
to type in before they arrive at my website?  

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So a couple of ideas... try and keep it short 
and sweet. You don't want it something too long.  

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You want it to be nice and memorable. They 
do give you about 63 characters but I mean  

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nobody wants to type 63 characters. As the 
meme says "ain't nobody got time for that",  

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plus you know the chances are that they might 
mistype something and that's another thing,  

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you know you don't want something that's a little 
bit too confusing. Like if it's a word that's  

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really easily misspelt, probably not a good 
idea. Another thing too and I was reading this,  

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I was kind of boning up before I came in here to 
tell you all about it, but homophones.. and I was  

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thinking about this. Like if you had like "hole 
in one", say a golf course... h-o-l-e, but you know  

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hole in one is probably gone. So you know, you 
might be thinking hmm well w-h-o-l-e it's whole it  

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works. No, it doesn't. You know because nobody is 
going to think oh yeah I'm going to type in ....it  

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was hole in one.com I'm sure. You know, they're not 
going to think oh it was w-h-o-l-e. You know. Yeah,  

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no. That doesn't work either, it needs to make 
sense. You know, unless you've actually made a big  

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play in your social media and your advertising 
that... no, it's spelt this way. Another way is to get  

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keywords in. Say, for example, I'm a website 
designer. If I could get say something like  

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web design in a domain name... so I 
don't know ...brilliant web design or  

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fantastic web design or affordable web 
design. If I could get that in a domain name  

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that would probably cost me a lot of money 
because whoever owns that would be charging  

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big, big bucks for it. But let's say for 
argument's sake I was able to get ahold of it...  

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what I could do, and this would be like a really 
hard choice because I mean, I'm really attached  

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to my domain name, because it's very personal 
to me, it's based on a nickname, but I could  

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either have scullywag.com forwarded to... what did 
I decide the name was? ... brilliant web design  

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or I could have brilliant web design forwarded 
to scullywag.com. So when somebody typed in  

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brilliantwebdesign.com it actually went to the 
scullywag.com website and it would say that up  

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the top. Because the reason we do that is because 
Google doesn't like duplicate content. If we had  

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two websites with identical content, Google's 
like... well what's going on here? Somebody's  

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plagiarizing something, you know and yeah 
Google doesn't want lots of cookie-cutter  

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websites with exactly the same stuff, you know, 
exactly the same text. It's like, you know,  

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these universities, just like.... no this ain't 
happening... this is not acceptable. So, yeah,  

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that's what we do and there's no reason 
why you couldn't have several different  

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domain names forwarding to one main domain 
name. In fact, that's what we do with some  

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of my clients in Australia. Some of them 
have a dot-com version of their domain name  

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and a com.au version and what we do, we just have 
the dot-com.au version go to the dot-com version.  

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I do have some other clients that are only within 
Australia, they aren't for a worldwide audience,  

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they service just people within Australia. 
So in that case we just leave it as a com.au.  

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Another option too is location. So let's just say, 
for example, I am a web designer but I only work  

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within the Brisbane area. That's not the case, 
I have clients worldwide but if I did, I might  

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want to try and get Brisbane in there. So it might 
be Brisbane web design and if that was the case,  

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you know, I would probably get scullywag.com to 
forward to Brisbane web design because if you're  

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in a specific area getting that location 
keyword in there is just brilliant. Oh,  

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I kind of touched on a little bit of country-level 
domain names. So for example in Australia dot com  

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dot au is the country-level domain name. I think 
in Canada it's dot ca. I know the UK it's dot  

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co dot uk. I think Germany is dot 
de. It's just different countries,  

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it's their own version. Usually and I know in 
Australia at the very least, if you are going to  

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use the dot com dot au version you need to have 
some sort of business registration. So you need  

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at least an ABN in Australia before you can 
register a dot com.au version of a domain name.  

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Another thing you might want to 
do is check social media handles.  

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So just say I hadn't bought scullywag but I 
decided that I wanted to buy scullywag.com,  

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I might be a little bit disappointed after 
I bought it to go and look for scullywag on  

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social media. I might find that... oh I can't get 
that handle on Facebook. It's already taken on  

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Instagram. It's already taken on Twitter. 
So if you're kind of tossing up a couple  

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of different domain names, that might be 
a deciding factor. Go have a look and see  

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if the social media handles are available. 
If that's something that's important to you.  

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There is a website that will actually search 
a whole heap or it used to. I'll try if I  

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can and dig that up and drop that in the links 
below, if I remember or if I'm able to find it.  

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Another thing you need to be aware of too is 
a domain name is something that needs to be  

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renewed on a regular basis. You may have paid for 
one year's domain name renewal, in which case,  

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in a year's time you'll need to pay it again... 
or I think they allow you to pay up to 10 years  

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and usually the longer time period that you're 
paying for in advance, usually, you get a little  

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bit of a discount on the yearly fee. If you do 
forget to pay or if you miss the renewal notice  

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that can cause a lot of problems because what 
happens is the domain name, it doesn't just become  

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available again, there's actually what's called a 
redemption period which is about between 30 and 40  

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days depending on the domain name registrar... 
and yeah that can be really painful because  

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I have one client that missed renewing their 
domain name and it had gone past what was  

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considered, what would you call it... a grace period and 
they wanted over a hundred dollars to allow her to  

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renew that domain name again and she actually 
decided to wait them out. You know it was going  

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into the redemption period, she'd have to wait 30 
or 40 days but then she'd be able to buy it again.  

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The only problem with that is that if somebody 
else had been waiting around and was aware of this  

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happening, and you can do this, you can look 
up when the domain name is up for renewal...  

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some will not have the details there but 
a lot of them do... and if they're keeping  

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an eye on that... they're kind of hmm, okay 
that's interesting and... actually I think  

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there was some case not long ago. I think within 
Australia, I think our prime minister actually,  

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somebody bought his domain name, which 
wouldn't have lasted long because, you know,  

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it kind of... that comes under trademark 
and copyright I suppose but yeah...There  

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was somebody else too there was some big 
company just recently...I forget who it was  

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but they forgot to renew their domain name and 
somebody else snapped it up. You know... people...  

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you just don't know what people are watching and 
you know waiting for... but she was fortunate,  

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my client, she was able to regain her 
dot com version. So now she's got the  

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two domain names and we just have the dot 
com dot au version forwarded to the dot com.  

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Anyway, I hope that's helpful. 
Yeah so if it was please  

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like, comment... if you've got any questions, 
let me know and I'll be back next time. Bye