Choosing a Business Name and Domain Name Basics
In the latest episode of the Digital Marketing with Bill Hartzer podcast, I talked about choosing a business name along with the ideal domain name. I also reflect on how checking for a trademark on the business name you’re choosing, and how it’s related to the domain name that you register. I also discussed why you should choose one name over another, and also went into domain name security, as well as other considerations to minimize risk of losing your domain name.
Here is the full transcript of the podcast. You can watch the video above at YouTube, or listen to it anywhere you download your podcasts.
Bill Hartzer(00:03):
This is Bill Hartzer. And this is the digital marketing podcast, the digital marketing podcast with Bill Hartzer. Today I’m going to talk about specifically, we’re going to go over choosing a business name as well as related, which is choosing a domain name and internet domain name. And in this particular case you talked a little bit about why, when you are going to name a business whether, you know, why you really need to at the same time, think about the internet domain name, because there are definitely considerations and it can be a lot more, a lot of hassles when it comes to your online presence. So choosing a domain and choosing a, you know, choosing a business name and choosing a name based on a domain name of a availability is definitely a consideration. So let’s say we’re, I’m going to use an example as a ditch, you know, digital digital company let’s use the example of blue snowball.
Bill Hartzer(01:20):
Okay. And kind of a generic word that w you know, the word blue is generic. The word snowball. And so we’re starting a business, a marketing company named blue snowball. So what we want to do is look at, you know, certainly that’s, that’s a name you know, whether or not we go with blue scope with snowball marketing, blue snowball.com you know, blue snowball.marketing, which is dub marketing as a new TLD or our generic ending if you will marketing, not digital and so forth. Dot com.net.org. Those are all endings, but there’s a couple of considerations here. We’re naming a business. And choosing that name, you know, we want to look at domain name availability what domain name for our branding of our business and name of the company you know, is, is there a domain available, is blue snowball.com available for domain registration or can we purchase it for a reasonable price being, you know reasonable is I’ll, I’ll also relative.
Bill Hartzer(02:39):
You know, it depends on you know, your budget, certainly, but you’re, if you name a company, blue snowball.com, okay. Or blue snowball, let’s look at two things. Let’s look at number one, develop a domain name, availability, number two, you know, want to look at are, is there another company in the same industry, essentially the same size, you know, as I see code, if you will, the same, you know, doing the same thing with the same name can you get a trademark on that business name now? You certainly can get a trademark. I’m not a trademark attorney, so you would want to run this by you know, a trademark attorney, but, you know, the basics are that, you know, you can, if you have, let’s say your business is named target. That’s not going to stop you from starting a company named target marketing, or or even just target because you’re in a different, if you, you know, as long as you’re not in the same industry as being a, let’s say a retail store and having the name target that’s not going to really stop you from getting a trademark if you’re in another industry.
Bill Hartzer(04:02):
And it’s clear that you’re in another industry and you still have the name target, or but say boost, snowball and blue snowball with the same, you know, there may be a trademark on that. And that might be, you know the name of a product. You know, it could be loose snowball. There could be actually a, you know, a food some trademark in the food industry or a food and beverage industry. But at the same time, if you’re going to name your, you know, your name, your company name, you know, blue snowball, then, you know, you want to make sure there’s not any other companies in that same industry. So the potential for looking at trademarks, if you’re in the United States, you would want to use the U SPTO tess system. And you can use, there is a search function there, and you can do a search, a basic search there.
Bill Hartzer(04:59):
I do recommend getting with the trademark attorney, that’s qualified and to do the searches as well to make sure that there’s not any conflicts, not only just you know, in the United States, if you’re in the United States, but in theory, you could, you know, if your company grows and you expand outside the United States, you’d want to actually make sure that that’s, you know, there’s availability there. Now, it doesn’t, you know, that doesn’t necessarily stop you from, you know, from from starting a company with that name. Because I have certain domain names that, and literally there were 26 to 28 different companies with the same exact name. They did different things. But there were, you know, there were potential buyers of that domain name because there were doing 26 different companies with the same such with the same name. So that happens.
Bill Hartzer(05:52):
And certainly, you know, thinking about target as a generic word or, or, you know, in this case, we’re using an example of blue snowball. So let’s considerations are, you know, if you name that, if we use both snowballs, a company named we’d want to look up, you know, trademark potential trademark issues, we wouldn’t want, want to look up do just a Google basic search, a basic Google search and for that word and see what comes up whether the, you know, whether or not there are any companies or whether or not, you know, if you are starting to get marketing company with that name, or what other, other service are there any products that are showing up because you are essentially going to be promoting that name. And so as you promote that name and it gets more notoriety okay.
Bill Hartzer(06:44):
And, and more people are searching for blue snowball. Well, are they, are they, even though it’s, it’s not necessarily, you know, a word, a keyword maybe that you would target, you know, as an SEO campaign you know you know, to try and rank for that keyword, but in some cases, you know, you want to make sure that there’s a potential that you can actually, you know, as you promote your business show up in the, in the search results and people can find you by company name. So why does that competition, like, that’s something that you’re going to want to, you kind of get gauged before you actually make all of these commitments as far as, you know naming your company. That that is a consideration because you’re, you’re looking at all Allie trademarks, but online competition, what are you, what is your competition overall you know, in that particular industry for your name and so forth, and just, what are, you know, what’s the competition for your name, your company name at the same time?
Bill Hartzer(07:53):
You know, look at, think about when somebody is going to type in blue snowball.com or your company name, are they going to be, you know, what’s the availability of that domain name. Okay. And are you going to be able to buy it? All that consideration is what we get to when we get to a point where we’re going, you’re going to file for the trademark. When you file, you will want to make sure you register the domain name at the same time, or essentially, you know, at the sign on the same day, what I am coming across now, and people are coming to my DM protect service right now, and be in protect to recover domain names because they filed, let’s say on, on January 1st, they filed for the trademark and January 2nd or third, somebody else went and bought the domain name. So all was happening is, is somebody was watching the new trademarks that were coming through.
Bill Hartzer(08:53):
They found a unique name. They knew that potentially that person would want, would want the domain name. So what they did is some, you know, the person, someone else registered that domain name in the hopes that they could sell it for a couple of thousand dollars to the person who just filed the trademark. So we’re having to help the trademark holder get a hold of that domain and shine off show that the domain registration was after the file, the trademark, and then the domain registration in this case was in bad faith because they essentially wanted to, you know, want to just sell that domain to the trademark holder. So that can Rena it’s, it’s, it can run an issue, but a little forward thinking here registering the name of your company name and similar names, or typos can save you a lot of hassle later on.
Bill Hartzer(09:58):
So that’s something we’d want to definitely do. The other consideration is choosing a name. That’s not, you know, if you set up, if you set up a company and do all sorts of branding and marketing around your company, name, booth snowball, and there already as a blue snowball.com. Yeah. You, you know, you might be able to get blue hyphen snowball or blue snowball.marketing, or, you know, something similar and something else. However, in that particular case, we may end up in a situation where you’re, you’re promoting and people are ending up typing in the other domain and, and there being some confusion there. So the domain name and availability and trademarks in your business name don’t just choose you know, my recommendation is don’t just choose a name that is a re you know, that, that a reason why you’re just choosing a name because you like the name.
Bill Hartzer(11:07):
There is some consideration here about, you know, your digital online presence. And so that comes in, in hand with trademarks, with availability of domain, with, you know, what your name and your company, what you know, are you going to name your company? The other options are maybe you are a Dallas dentist, a dentist in Dallas. Okay. and you’re, you know, you have, you know, blue snowball is your blue snowball dentistry. Okay. Is your company name will, do you want to make your company name or your domain name, you know, Dallas dental.com or Dallas dentists.com where you have a different domain different than they got your company name in that case where you’re using a keyword as your domain name and, you know, especially the city name or just using a keyword in your domain name, and that’s different much, much different than your company name.
Bill Hartzer(12:12):
You’ll still want to get your company name and do some redirects, redirect the visitors from blue snowball.com to you know, to Dallas dental.com or Dallas dentist be your keyword name. So still even though that’s, you know, that’s an option you may want to, you know, I’ll work using a city name and when that’s going to be our primary domain name, we have a key w a geo name, G a word, you know, a location. Okay. one of the considerations that, you know, you, you, that I recommend looking into is that, you know, the potential, certainly you are in Dallas, or let’s choose Dallas as an example here. Okay. And you get Dallas dentist and that’s your, that’s your domain name. Okay. We’re giving your business name in that case. You know, what are the, what’s the potential, the future will you potentially have additional locations?
Bill Hartzer(13:23):
Will you move have an additional location in Austin also, maybe in, in, you know, in Plano, Texas or suburb of Dallas are you going to like span potentially, you may not have plans to expand right now, but you may later, you may, you may expand to other cities, other states, other locations, you may move. So you may move your business for whatever reason you may, you know, be in Dallas and you might need to relocate for some reason, you know, a family reason to another city in another state, then you’re tied to Dao, you know, Dallas, the city name, you know, keyword.com. That’s all relative about your strong overall strategy and naming your business and so forth. So that’s definitely, you know, something to think about when we come into registering domains. Okay. As far as checking availability I recommend that you probably not go specifically to a registrar to check availability.
Bill Hartzer(14:37):
Let’s say, you know go, you know, go to you know, Eddie, you know, a domain registrar where you would buy the name. You would not want to go there. What you would want to do is, is ready to recommend specifically is going to something like the yowling to the main ICANN website, which typically is look up dot icann dot org and looking at up there, because, because what can happen is, and there’s been reports, you know, it’s all about, this is all about risk, but basically if you’re going and looking up a bunch of domain names, a matter of one particular registrar, there is the potential for somebody to somehow get a hold of that data that you’re working up domain names of one particular registrar and looking at availability. And then, you know, if you don’t, if you don’t re you don’t buy the name right then, and there you wait a day or two, then somebody else might register that domain.
Bill Hartzer(15:46):
You know, whether or not that person had in, you know, who registered it knew that you were looking it up. Okay, well, that’s, you know, that that’s, that’s a whole totally different story. But at the same time, you know, it, it there’s potential risk there so far as availability goes, if you just looking at, to see if something is available in, you know, dot com.net.org now I would look up, use the, I can look up now when it comes to registrars you know, there are, you know, for typical.com, let’s say.com domain names. There are typically what say, you know, there, there there’s thousands of options for registrars. There’s ones that are cheap. That’s, there’s ones that are more expensive. You can certainly get a coupon you know, and, and get a dollar 99, or pay 99 cents for a domain name for the first year.
Bill Hartzer(16:49):
You know, this is your, this is your domain name that we’re talking about. Okay. You need to, you know, w what I recommend is that you realize that this is, like I said, this is your domain name. Okay. Then we’re talking about your domain name is tied to your email. It’s tied to your, your, your email, your website and, and your brand. Okay. And if you lose your domain name, your website goes down. You, you know, you say, let’s say you have customers doing searches, hitting our website. You’re paying for Google ads, your pay, you know, you have all the social media, you have the links from other websites to your website. You have all these promotions going on. Maybe you’re viewing offline advertising on radio, television you know, different media and so forth billboards. This is your domain name. Okay. So paying a dollar or $2 for your domain name.
Bill Hartzer(18:00):
Yeah. You know, I have reservations about that. You lose your domain name and you overnight instantly lose your business. You know, you lose access to email, you lose access to your website, all your leads. You know, it’s devastating to businesses who lose their domain names. And so I have a business, you know, that I’m involved in DN protect D N protects.com, and we recover stolen domain names. And we can, we have, you know, we recover domains or issue, you know, the main two that have been lost for whatever reason would deal with issues like this every single day, you know, number one is there’s two issues. You know, they, they, they don’t, they didn’t choose the right registrar. And so the registrar, you know, basically for some reason, doesn’t have their back, your BA you know, didn’t have their back when, when they didn’t, you know, they didn’t renew, or somebody hacked into their account.
Bill Hartzer(19:07):
You know, our, the domain was just transferred out without their knowledge to somebody else or something like that. Or, you know, I’m also dealing with issues that someone had Ray had bought a domain. It was, you know, their businesses so forth and, and S you know, it is it’s everything for them. And they had their credit card set up to auto renew, you know, auto renew. And for whatever reason, it did not auto renew, and they lost the domain name. You know, and, and at that point it had expired. Someone else had purchased it. You know, at that point they ended up, you know, now we’re dealing with the fact that they’ll have dependents, spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to get it back simply because they, they re you know, relied on the fact that system work was, was supposed to work.
Bill Hartzer(20:09):
Auto renew that the credit card was, you know was still valid that, you know, that it was a credit, you know, that the credit card transaction went through that that, you know, the expiration date didn’t need to be re you know, be changed or updated that you know, there’s a transaction one little transaction that goes through once a year, if you have it set up for a renewing annually, you know, you’re, again, you are there, it’s risky, you are inviting risk when you have something set up on auto renew and you, and every year you’re that it, that everything will go through. You can take care of that. You can renew your domain name for at least five years. That’s what I recommend at this point. I recommend highly recommend renewing a domain name, additionally, for at least five years.
Bill Hartzer(21:08):
Then obviously you want to set it up properly. There’s a lot of other systems, you know, not just pointing it to a web host, they’ll want, obviously a web host that is separate from where you registered domain name. I have seen, you know for, you know, websites for whatever reason being taken down or, or are by the web host and they didn’t want her hosts the domain anymore. Because of, you know, because of constantly got hacked or because of, you know, because of content on the website generally that’s not issue for most businesses, but you know, it can be. And so there can be other issues that, you know, web hosts doesn’t want to, or does, or, you know, the web host goes out of business. And if you’ve renewed the domain, if you’ve registered the domain name to that web post you have your web host, your website and up and running on a server and the web house goes out of business.
Bill Hartzer(22:11):
And then all of a sudden, okay, while you are not, you cannot access the, the main name, you cannot access the web hosting. So I recommend using a different domain registrar, then you do your web host. And that way, if you’re, you know, have a website or your website goes down, or for whatever reason, you know, it gets cropped or whatever, ideally you’ll have backups every day, every website. So then you could just go to your domain registrar, get a new web host, upload your old BA you know, your backup from let’s say a day or two ago where your website was not corrupt, where it wasn’t, you know, hacked into point it to the new web host and you’re up and running. You know, that typically depending on the size of your website, that actually could be done within an hour. So in that case, you know, that can be done.
Bill Hartzer(23:11):
So as far as domain registration goes I do, like I said, I do recommend not relying on auto renew because I’m seeing cases come across all the time that were auto renew for whatever reason failed and somebody else ended up purchasing the domain name. I’m an expired domain option or in some other situation. So that said as far as domain names go those are, you know, that’s my thoughts around brand new domain names, ones that you are going to register and related to a brand new business. When we, the other option is that you may find, you know, you have a business name and you’ve done your research and so forth. You found that there is a domain name that is expired, that that you might, you know, this, that might get number one, you want to do diligence due diligence on the domain name.
Bill Hartzer(24:13):
I have lots of other podcasts, other videos, or the articles where I’ve gone through and showed, showed you extra, like the due diligence that you can do on a domain name. Even though if it’s a new domain name, you still, because we’ve had domains for, you know, since on you know, the nineties 1983 first domain name registered around, you know, it and so forth. But you know, a lot of domain names have actually been used before and used for a few years and then dropped it so forth. They have history, they may have links from their other websites. Those are good links or battlings those are, you know, there, there may be traffic to them from the industry and they may be, you know, formerly on a topic that is not related to the domain name.
Bill Hartzer(25:06):
And so you can always archive.org and look at the old, you know, whether there was a website on that domain name or not before. So there’s a lot of due diligence you can do, I’ve gone through it. And you can also run a DNP, you know, find out the DFP score of the domain name DN protects.com. And that does kind of a check on some of the issues you may want to look into also the, the back links the links from other websites sites like majestic.com will show you the back links to your domain, to the domain name before you purchase it, you want to, you know, if, if a good example is marketing.com, marketing.com sold recently for over $2 million, however, the links are not very good at all, and fart those a lot of spam pointing to that domain, even though it’s a really great domain marketing.com you know, doing the due diligence, probably if there wasn’t marketing.com, if it was just some other word, I would never even touch that particular domain because of the fact that there’s so much spam associated with it in the past.
Bill Hartzer(26:17):
And there are other issues I’ve done some other podcasts and other videos related to due diligence might want to look into those. You could also do a search bill Hart, ser due diligence domains, or domain due diligence. Put my name in there and you’ll be able to find a lots of material there. So I said you I’ll expire domains also. Number one is you know, a former, you know trademarks definitely. That’s something that obviously you absolutely have to check. There are any trademark issues because most likely if it was expired domain, if it wasn’t form of business then actually you would want to check out to see if they had gotten a trademark is more, more likely that they did with an expired domain rather than a domain that that is just available for registration that said, this has been the Digital Marketing with Bill Hartzer podcast for Thursday, September 23rd, 2021.
Bill Hartzer(27:28):
Thanks for listening. You can certainly subscribe to my podcast on YouTube. There’s also a lot of other options podcasts on anything from apple podcasts, iheart radio and a lot of other areas and, and a lot of other places out there on the web. I typically will do be doing a transcript of this podcast, if there’s any websites or any concepts or anything that I mentioned here, feel free to get in touch with me on my you can reach me through billhartzer.com or just do a search for my name and you can find me. Thanks.