394 – Buying a domain name has its pitfalls: Tom talks Getting the Domain Name You Want

Episode 394 – Getting Domain
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred ninety four of Screw the commute podcast. We're going to talk about getting the domain name you want. And if you think you know how to buy a domain name, you got to listen to this episode. There's so many tricks and tips about this. There's so many bad things that can happen to you and even make you look foolish if you do the wrong thing. So listen up. I'm going to tell you all the things you need to know to buy a great domain name for yourself. I hope you didn't miss Episode 393. That was Deirdre Tshien. Wow. She grew five businesses to seven figures and she now coaches online business owners on her secret sauce of using buyer psychology to make their offerings irresistibly contagious to their customers. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? Well, if the show has helped you at all in your business or giving your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it because it's good for you to come and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it, talking to your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you. And also put your website on there so you can get a big shout out on a future episode of Screw the Commute. All right. Make sure you grab a copy of our automation ebook. It's at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. We sell this book for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show and it has helped me. It stopped me from getting carpal tunnel syndrome with all the keystrokes that saved me. And it helps me take care of customers and prospects. Lightning fast knocks my workload down tremendously. So grab your copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and then while you're over there, get a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can put it on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right. Check out my school. It's the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. Probably the world certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. Do yourself and your kids a favor by getting them an education that. Gives them skills that are in super high demand. Every business on Earth needs email, marketing and chatbots and blogs and everything else that goes along with their shopping carts and product production and all these things that every business needs. We teach it in the school and you're not going to go for years and learn how to protest and then get out and compete for jobs at Starbucks. So check it out at IMTCVA.org. And a little bit later, I'll tell you how you can get a full scholarship to the school. If you were in my mentor program, which you could either gifted to a person that means something to you or use it yourself for extra training.

[00:03:27] All right. Let's get to the main event. We're going to talk about getting a domain name you want or even better, a domain name that makes sense and works for you instead of being weird or promoting others accidentally and even making you a laughing stock. And I'm laughing, but I'm not kidding. You'll see a little later how people got domain names. It just made them look really stupid. Now, let me mention a little terminology here and give you a few warnings. Now, where do you purchase and actually you're actually leasing the domain name for a period of time, but anyway, where you choose and pay for your domain name is called a registrar. And the company may be other things, too, like they might be a hosting company and and a registrar of like kind of like the well-known GoDaddy. And speaking of GoDaddy, they are master up sellers don't get sucked into buying all the doodads and bells and whistles the registrars will try to sell you. It's like it's like you buy a two dollar domain name off of GoDaddy. And by the time you check out your bills like four hundred dollars. And so, so yeah, I'm exaggerating but but hopefully you get the idea. Don't let them sell you a bunch of extra stuff. Maybe, maybe you can pay for a private domain that doesn't list your home address and in your name. But, but in the seven to eight hundred domains I've purchased, I've never paid for anything but the domain. Now here's another big I'm going to call this a big warning. Make sure you are the registrant and the administrative contact when you get your domain.

[00:05:20] Your Web person can be the technical contact. Absolutely do not get lazy and let your Web person buy the domain name for you and make them sell the registrant.

[00:05:36] See, what that means is your webmaster owns your Web site, not you, if you have a falling out with them, which is very common, you will have an enormous amount of trouble and fees, both legal and governmental, to get it back.

[00:05:54] Now, here's the next big warning, do whatever you can to get the dot com. Now, it's OK with me if you want to buy the dot net and dot org version and all the others so someone else can't get them if you're flush with money, but only. Do that if you can get the dot com. See if someone is trying to remember to type your domain name into their browser. They are absolutely going to type dot com after if you are dot org or dot net or some other the myriad domain names they got and they're coming up with all the time, part of your traffic is going to go to the person who has the dot com. It's just as simple as that.

[00:06:40] Also, you could get in legal trouble, you know, people can sue anybody for anything nowadays and and the owner of the original dot com might say something like, we are trying to infringe on their brand name by registering a similar domain name and if they have a big team of lawyers.

[00:07:01] Well, let me quote from the the name of this podcast, OK? You're pretty much screwed.

[00:07:07] Even if you could win the lawsuit, your legal fees are probably going to be staggering. You're probably better off either trying to get an original dot com domain name or switching to a different name entirely so that you can get the dot com. Now, I'm going to give you a ways to try to get the dot com or a variation thereof of the domain you want a little later, right at the end, I think. And that's if the main one you want is not available in the dot com. Now, how would you like another big warning? OK, you said you thought that buying domains was easy, right? Absolutely do not check a domain name at a registrar if you aren't ready to purchase it immediately. I'm really serious about this. There's a fraudulent activity called domain name frontrunning, where insiders at the registrar grabbed the domain name and try to sell it back to you for a big profit. And in the show notes, I've put the Wikipedia link to this this bad fraudulent activity so you can read about it if you want. All right, here's another warning you can buy previously owned domains from the owners or brokers of domain's or even off an owner selling on eBay or places like Flippa.com.

[00:08:34] Now, I've also included a bunch of other places that buy and sell domain names in the show notes. Flippa, Sedo, NameCheap and a bunch of others. You have to be extremely careful when using these sites, because the old owners may have done so many bad or black hat things with the domain that they got it banned from Google. And probably if it's banned from Google, it's banned from all the search engines, a domain like this would not be worth as much to purchase. I mean, people could still go directly to it if you sent them there, but you would never get any free traffic from the search engines. So how do you tell if the domain is banned? Well, I can't possibly tell you better than Matt Cutts from Google. I'm not sure he's still there, but he made a great video on it. If and if you're going to buy a used domain in the show, notes will be a link to the video of all the tips you need to know to see if your site was banned before you buy it. Chances are if it's banned, you probably just don't want to buy it. Now before you bother with all the things the Google guy is going to tell you to do in that video. The simplest thing is just to check to see if the name you're thinking of is being used and has current content on it. If it's up online and being used with the current copyright date and current blog postings and looks like it's being used regularly, it's pretty much not available unless the owner wants to sell it.

[00:10:14] Now, you would have to contact the owner directly to ask if they'd be willing to sell and for how much. And hey, I mean, maybe you could get lucky. I have before. But I mean, maybe they want to retire or they're just sick of running the site. So it's worth giving it a shot if you really want. Now, if there is nothing at the site, that doesn't mean it's available, it may just not be developed yet, or as in my case, I mean, I've bought up lots of domains just so someone else couldn't have them. I don't plan on developing them, but I just don't want you developing them. OK. Now, once you've figured out that the domain isn't being used, you have to find out who owns the domain. The easiest way to do this is by using a Whois lookup? I happen to use a site called Whois.sc. But there are many of them out there. Just look at who is lookups and that's you'll find a bunch up now at that site you put in the domain name and unless it's private, you can find out who the domain was registered by when it was registered, how to contact the person or company and the domains when it expires and a bunch of stuff like that. Now, if it's private, you can email your request to the broker or privacy companies company listed. But don't hold your breath for a quick response. Or you could get a or or you could get a quick response with a super high purchase price.

[00:11:55] All right, so let's say you do find a domain name, someone that's not a registrar is willing to sell you. My warning here is to use a reputable escrow service like escrow.com. See, an escrow service protects both the buyer and the seller by holding the money until both parties are satisfied with the deal and the deal is all done, everybody's happy.

[00:12:24] I would be very, very, very reluctant to use an escrow service the seller recommends, because the scam is the seller owns the fake escrow service, you pay them the money thinking it's safe and they take the money and they don't deliver the domain to you.

[00:12:46] All right. Now, this next warning is is kind of funny, but it's funny for us, but it's not necessarily for the website owners. But here's the thing, make sure your domain doesn't spell out something weird.

[00:13:07] Now I'm going to put in the show notes to link to a place called boredpanda.com and the worst domain names are. But having to give you some there are some of them are a little racy here, folks. Not really explicit, but it's something you really need to pay attention to when you pick a domain name to make sure it doesn't read a different way when people look at it. So I'll give you some examples here.

[00:13:32] I can't help but laugh my way through it.

[00:13:35] So therapist in a box. Turns out to look like the rapist in a box. And there's also one therapist finder, which is therapistfinder.com. Ok, it's a bit crazy.

[00:13:54] This next one is a travel site for PenIsland.net. And it reads penis land dot net. When you look at. Now, this next one, this guy I've known for a long, long time, and he kind of got mad at me, he came up to me at an event and he says, hey, Tom, what do you think about all this stuff I developed here? And and I started laughing because I thought he was kidding me. But the guy is into intellectual property and how you can make money licensing, licensing it to companies and all great information. Right. But I start laughing when he shows me his paperwork. He says he got the domain and it stands for intellectual property money, but it says, I P money. I don't know if he he scrapped it or if he went through with it. But he was very happy with me for pointing that out because I was I couldn't help but laugh uncontrollably at IP money. There's another one expert's exchange, dot com, that seems like a good place to go to find experts, right? Well, if you look at look at it, it says expert sex change dot com. Now, another one is is an artistic side, it's speed of art, dot com, and it reads Speedo Phat Dot com. I have a very good theory about this other site was for the north of Boston Jewish Singles Dog and the website is abbreviated no BJ's dog. The other one was Chew's, Spain, another, it was another travel site, but it looks like Chooses Payen dot com and the last one is Web one, which I don't know if it was a bank or whatever, but you look at it, it looks like we bone. So please, please have a lot of people look at your domain name and make sure it doesn't it's not like one of those. And if you want to see more of them, we'll have a link in the show notes to that Bored Panda site that you can take a look at these.

[00:16:36] All right. Let's get into some more tips and warnings. Well, there's a guy I'm going to interview here pretty soon. His name is David Mirman. Scott, I've read his books. I think I know him from our speakers association. I'm not sure talked to him years ago, but one of his books I really like is The New Rules of Marketing and PR. And he's got other ones, too. But it's not that he's crazy about his middle name, Murman. And it's not that he's trying to appear regal, you know, he seems like a pretty down to earth guy. It was just a smart move, taking a plain Jane name like David Scott and branding himself to be found. See if someone was just looking for David Scott. There's probably thousands of them out there. But guess what? There's only one David Merman Scott. So that's a good tip. If you have a common name is throw in your middle name or some other thing around it so that that sets you apart. Now, here's another tip, any time there are numbers involved in your domain name, get the numeral and the spelling. So here's an example. Let's say pizza to go dot com while you must get pizza and then the number to go dot com and then pizza t w o go dot com.

[00:18:02] Say you have to have both, because if you don't, people will mess it up and either find a site that doesn't work and think that you're out of business or go to your competitor.

[00:18:14] Now, if you got any kind of like word, doctor, you know, some of the people I remember the telephone doctor and the sales doctor, but let's say you got the sales doctor. Well, you must get sales. Deals are. And sales, D.O.C. Tom here, you buy both of them and you have one point to the other, I'll talk about pointing later. Now, sometimes you combine things, let's say blinds for you. Well, you need to get several versions, so Blind's and then the number four and then you and then blind's the number four and the letter you by itself. And then you got to keep going, say, when you got a double whammy here and then blind's f o u r y o u blind's for you and blind's f o you are.

[00:19:13] And then the letter you and I think with today's society, why people can't spell, I would get FORE, you know, also and throw it into the mix and and and any time you get cute, you know, like that you can hurt yourself. So and just think of the mess this Blind's place would be in if they used a Z at the end of blinds instead of an S. All right. You'd have to do all of them all again. So you'd end up with, I don't know, 12 domain's instead of one. Now we use what is called the radio or podcast test. Would someone hearing your domain name on the radio or on a podcast instantly and without extra explanation, be able to write down or type in your domain name? If they have to ask about it or if you always have to give an extra explanation, it could be a bad domain name, think twice about it. If people just have to click on it when it doesn't matter much, but if they're going to hear it and remember it and type it incorrectly to find you, it better be easy.

[00:20:25] Now, another thing you're going to want to do is to make sure you can get all the social media handles matching what you're doing. I still went with screwthecommute.com for this podcast, but I couldn't get for Facebook. Screw the commute, so I had to do zero commute because screw the commute wasn't available.

[00:20:50] I'm really surprised whoever has that Facebook page didn't grab the dot com website and everything else like I did. Another big no no that we used to use all the time is hyphens. Did you know I had domain names in the early days that had multiple hyphens? Remember, I've been around a long time. Sometimes there were three or five hyphens to be able to stuff keywords into the domain name. All right. And by the way, keywords in the domain name are not that effective anymore from Google's standpoint, from search engine standpoint, but they are from the potential customers standpoint. So if you were looking to buy a new dining room table and you saw the following domain names, which would you click on? Joe's furniture or dining room tables direct dot com. All right, so that was exactly what you were looking for. So keywords in the domain name are good for potential customers to get him to click. Now, any time you have hard spellings by the common misspellings of the domain name and pointed to the proper domain, pointing is just something where if they type in the wrong spelling, usually your registrar will let you send people to the proper domain name. So that's what pointing is, and please don't make your domain names too long. Generally, the shorter the better known a minute I'm going to give you ideas to work around and get a domain name on your topic when the one you wanted wasn't available. Now, folks, if you'd like to learn this and like a hundred other things that you need to know to have a successful online business, check out my mentor program.

[00:22:45] It's the longest running, most successful, most unique program ever. And I don't mind saying that because I have dared people for many years to bring a program, put it next to mine, and let's compare them line to line. And nobody will do it because I'm a crazy fanatic. They should call this Crazy Tom's mentor program because all I do day and night is run this thing weekends, evenings, holidays. I'll take consultation's on holidays. I've thrown teleclasses and webinars on holidays and I mean I'm just a crazy nut case to to to get you success. That's what I love. That's what I was put on this earth for. So it's unique. It's unique in the fact that you don't have to pay the 50 or 100 grand guys like me are worth. If they would actually help you, you pay an entry fee and then you pay a percentage of your profits, that's capped at fifty thousand. That way for me to get my fifty thousand, you have to net two hundred thousand and then you don't owe me another nickel and you're, you know, you're pretty much an expert online. And then we have an immersion weekend at the great Internet Marketing Retreat Center in Virginia Beach. Of course, when the covid things done. But you have an immersion weekend. You actually live in this estate home. We have a TV studio here that we shoot marketing videos for you put the graphics on, send them to you after you get back.

[00:24:16] Those things cost thousands and thousands of dollars to get a studio and have all this stuff done. It's just part of the deal with me. Also, everything is one on one except your visit to the retreat center because and even that is average of five people here. So you get lots of personal attention. But the rest of the program, you have a year access to us where we take over your screen one on one. I don't like group stuff because in group stuff, if I'm talking to advance people, the beginners are lost. And if I'm talking to beginners, the advanced people are bored. That's not efficient. There's no way for me to get both of you to your money goals. So it's one on one with me and everybody that works here. We have subject matter experts that will help you with all the stuff necessary. So it's very, very unique. I don't mind saying that. And you get a scholarship to my school, which you can either use yourself for extra training or gift to someone. And we've had students in there making money, you know, side hustles just a couple months into the school. The the biggest one I know of is girls making six thousand dollars a month after only four months in the school. So very, very powerful program. You've got a you know, sometimes it's good to deal with crazy fanatic people, and I'm one of them. So when especially when they're on your side fighting for you. So anyway, that's at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. Check it out and get in touch with me. And we will talk about your future and your loved ones future online.

[00:25:59] All right. Let's get back to the main event. Here's one more tip I want to give you about getting a domain name when the one you wanted was not available. There's always some kind of workaround. So let me give you a couple examples here. Let's say you wanted used toys dot com, and you couldn't get it. Well, how about Toms used toys dot com? Put your name in there. What about use toys? Cheap dot com? How about cool used toys, dot com. Say there's always something of great use. Toys dot com. What if you wanted holistic tips, dot com, well, how about how about great holistic tips, dot com or holistic health tips, dot com or natural holistic tips dot com. Say you can usually add your name or some kind of additional word, either before or after or even before and after the name you want it. Just don't give up the dot com and make sure you can get the social media to match. All right. So I hope you see there there's a lot more to buy in a domain name than just slapping down a few bucks or a lot of bucks at GoDaddy. They so take these tips to heart check the show notes to see some of those funny domain names out there.

[00:27:18] And you can get yourself a great domain name that really serves your purpose and doesn't make you look like an idiot. All right. That's it folks. We'll catch you all on the next episode. See ya later.

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