Web site domain names are critical to the security and branding of your business.

Although not necessary, it’s becoming more and more important in the process serving and investigation industries to have a web site. One of the major components of your online presence is your domain name (or names).

Domain names are critical components of branding your company, protecting your intellectual property and maintaining your competitive edge. If you don’t get the domain names relevant to your business your competitors will, if they have not already done so. This is a concept referred to in the Internet world as “cyber squatting”.

The team at ServeNow.com/PInow.com would like to share the following tips about choosing and registering your domains to prevent cyber squatting.

Domain Basics
A domain name is a company’s presence, address and brand on the Internet. For example, “nciss.com” is the domain name representing the National Council of Investigation & Security Services and napps.org represents the National Association of Professional Process Servers. By registering your domains, like the NCISS and NAPPS did, you protect your brand and create brand awareness.

Typically, companies buy generic top level domains to represent their business. Commonly used domain extensions are .com, .net and .org, which refer to commercial, network and organization, respectively. Often, you will hear people say, “visit my website”, or “check out my URL” (uniform resource locater). They are referring to their domain in these instances.

Protecting your Trade Name
Domain names are part of your company’s intellectual property. If you register your domain today, you secure your online brand tomorrow.

Had NCISS or NAPPS not registered nciss.com and napps.org, respectively, someone else could have easily done so; leaving these organizations open to brand theft, brand confusion and loss of revenue.

If you have your company name trademarked, you may have some recourse if another company is using your trade name. Trademarking your brand warrants another article in itself, but you can find more about trademarks at http://www.uspto.gov/.

Get them All!
Not only should you get the .com version of your domain name, but you should also register the .net, .org, .us, .info and .biz versions of your domain. You won’t have a separate web site for each extension, but you can forward each domain to the .com site. Sure, it may cost you an extra $40 per year to have all the extensions, but what’s that worth when it comes to keeping competitors from using the brand and name you’re marketing so heavily?

Think Outside the Box
If your company name is Terri’s Investigations, you will definitely want to refer to the above paragraph and grab all domains relevant to your company name (e.g. – terripi.com, terrisinvestigations.com, etc.).

However, there may also be a handful of other domains you should consider registering. For instance, maybe you are located in Waterloo, IA – if waterlooinvestigations.com, waterloobackgroundchecks.com, waterloopi.com, etc. are not registered you should register these as well. Over the years these domains will become assets to your company.

Several years ago, the business.com domain was sold for $7 million dollars. Recently the company built around the same domain was sold for $350 million dollars.

The Internet is only going to grow and eventually become the most powerful medium for marketing your firm.

Hopefully, the domains important to your company are not already registered.

Where and how do I get a domain name?
Registering a domain name is affordable and easy. Here are a few ICANN accredited domain registrars to choose from:

• www.redhatdomains.com $9.95/yr – low cost and great domain management and hosting services
• www.networksolutions.com $34.99/yr
• www.register.com $35.00/yr

At ServeNow.com and Pinow.com we have registered thousands of names and use Red Hat Domains (http://www.redhatdomains.com) for their cost effectiveness, suite of domain management tools and customer service.

If you require assistance when registering domains that fit your company’s needs, please do not hesitate to contact the ServeNow.com / PInow.com team at (877) 737-8366 or (888) 997-4669.