Custom Email Address Domains

By Registering Your Own Domain You Should Never Need to Change Your Email Address Again

The Problems With Using Free Email or ISP EMail Addresses

Using free services like Hotmail, Google or Yahoo to create extra email addresses, or to register several email addresses with your ISP (Internet Service Provider) is fine, but should anything happen to cause your account to be suspended or canceled, or should you change your ISP, you then have to notify your Family, Friends and other Contacts of your new email address, as well as re-register new addresses with all the web sites that you subscribe to.

This is extremely frustrating, and inevitably you will end up losing track of addresses or registered sites, especially if you can no longer access your old emails.

Boost Your Online Identity By Getting Your Own Domain

By registering your own custom email address domains, your email instantly stands out as yours and is easier to remember. For example, if you registered brownfamily.com you could create emails like [email protected], [email protected] and the whole family can have an identity.

Registering your own Domain also allows you to create your own web site, which in the case of our example would be www.brownfamily.com. This is a nice thing to have for your family, where you can post photographs, blog about your vacations, events etc, your family history – the scope is endless. But for the scope of this article, I would like to try to demonstrate the benefits with regard to email safety.

You are now in complete control of your own email addresses, so either by changing ISP, or doing anything else, other than acts which cause your domain to be banned, your email address should now last forever.

How Do I Register My Own Domain?

What Is The Cost To Register A Domain?

You can register a domain with any valid Registrar, such as Namecheap.com and it costs about US$10 a year, which is very minimal. You also need to have your email hosted, and Namecheap offers this for about US $9.88/yr, although you can get cheaper.

What Are The Real Benefits Of Having My Own Domain?

I can see the hands going up now and the questions forming, as you ask why you should pay for having your own domain just to get a pretty email address and web site. You can get free email and free web pages in any case. There must be something that makes this all worthwhile, and not just another drain on your finances.

Valid points, thanks for asking, and I am about to come to this point.

The huge benefit to having your own domain, and I mean HUGE, is that your email addresses never need change again. There is now no need at all to use your ISP provided emails, except to maybe receive emails from your ISP. You can give your address [email protected] to your family and close friends, and your wife can give hers [email protected] to her friends too. Don’t forget the kids [email protected] and [email protected] and even Grandma can now have a fancy email address [email protected]. Should you change your ISP, for example going from Comcast to AT&T, because your email address is not one of theirs, it never need change.

What Is Email Forwarding ?

Imagine that you want to be able to categorize your email messages based on the address that they are sent to.

This is rather like Magazines, Government Departments, Mail In Rebates etc having a P.O.Box Number as part of the address. Even though the mail is received at the same address, it can be sorted by P.O. Box Number and sent to the right department for processing.

The same is true of emails if you create forwarding addresses.

Let’s say that you decide to create a email address for your banking, and set this up as [email protected].

This is great, but it still might be possible for emails to be sent to that address that are not genuine. By creating forwarding email addresses you can greatly decrease the likely hood of this happening.

When you create a Forwarding Address, it’s not a real address that you have to log into. It just points to a real email address.

For example, you might bank with Chase Bank. You can create a forwarding address [email protected] that points to [email protected] and then use [email protected] to register with Chase Bank to do all your online banking. When you receive mail from them, they will send it to [email protected], but it will be forwarded and received into your Inbox for [email protected]. If you look at the “To” address for the email, even though it’s in your [email protected] account, it shows that the message was actually sent to [email protected]

Does that make sense?

If we expand this to say Shopping, you can create a email address called [email protected], and have forwarding addresses for everywhere that you shop online, for example [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc.

Now if you receive an email from Chase Bank that looks genuine, and it was sent to any address other than [email protected], you know that it isn’t genuine. Ditto any messages from Amazon, eBay etc should have been sent to the correct address. This can greatly cut down the chance that you fall for fraudulent emails.

In addition, if you register with a web site that you are not 100% sure about, you can allocate a forwarding email address for that purpose. Should the email address start to receive lots of junk mail, viruses etc, you can just delete the forwarding address and the mail will stop. Because no messages are actually sent to your physical email address, you don’t have to change anything else.

Why So Many Forwarding Addresses?

Many email readers allow you to create rules to highlight certain messages, or to move them automatically to certain folders. You can also define rules that will send out an Auto-Responder message when an email is received. One of the simplest ways to control all of this is to use forwarding addresses.

If you think this out, you can really make your email processing as well as your security a lot better, and when you are receiving 100 or more messages a day from a given source, having separate email addresses and a good mail reader really make it easier to process. This can also save you a lot of time.

By improving the way that people use email, we can hopefully help to cut down on online fraud, and also save people time and effort.

Domain Name Value

Launching an online business is, in many ways, a radically different process than setting up a traditional brick-and-mortar store, but the two endeavors also share more than a few commonalities.

It helps if you think of your web site as a real, literal store or office space for your online small business, existing in the virtual space of the Internet. Your online site has many things a real store or office would have:

A “showroom” (the home page); “aisles” of merchandise (the pages of your online catalog); even a “backroom” with the inventory and customer files (your site’s administrative back-end).

Your web site’s design and functionality are the “decor” of your store. And your site’s domain name? Think of that as the big sign hanging out on your storefront, and you’ll instantly see why a great domain can either make or break a small online business.

5 Myths Debunked About Domain Name Value

Now that I put plenty of pressure on you with this decision, I’m here to tell you that despite what you may have read or heard to the contrary, choosing the perfect domain name for your small business is a very easy and painless process.

In my many years of professional web site design for the small business, I have heard my clients repeat the same five potentially destructive myths about domain-name purchasing that, until I showed them differently, were sabotaging their efforts to launch an online business.

1. A domain name can only be registered by a professional “techie.”

Gone are the days when a business owner needed any level of technical expertise in order to purchase their own domain names. Today, all the major domain name registrars, such as Register.com, GoDaddy.com and NameCheap.com, have streamlined their domain name purchasing and management processes as much as humanly possible – with the layperson in mind.
Their administrative back-ends are all geared to the non-technical customer, with the payment process no more complicated than buying from any other online store.

Most helpful of all, all the major (and most of the minor) registrars will all send you detailed explanatory welcome letters once your purchase is complete, written in plain, easy-to-understand language.

The big companies like the ones I just listed even have 24/7 telephone support, all aimed at giving the layperson complete control of his or her domain name.

Another factor in your favor: there just isn’t a great deal of variation in the services these companies offer. Typically, they all allow you to search what names are available, check off the one(s) you want, take you through the payment checkout process, then send you the information for how to log in to your account and manage your domain names.

Much like when buying a sign for your storefront, you just have to shop around a little to get the best deal that suits your needs, but generally speaking, a domain is a domain is a domain.

2. My domain name has to be the same as my business name.

This is a very common – and not necessarily true – assumption. I tell my web development clients that the only time when it’s absolutely crucial that your domain name is the name of your company or product is when you have aggressive branding plans.

For example, say you have just invented The Amazing Widget, which you intend to advertise and develop as a large-scale brand and eventually become next Christmas’ hottest-selling must-have item.

In this case, it would then certainly behoove you to purchase amazingwidget.com. Or, let’s say that you’re intending to launch an auction site that is going to blow eBay and uBid out of the water, and the name of your new online auction business is BoogieBids.

You want BoogieBids to be the name on everyone’s lips when they think of online auctions. In this case, the only way to go is to purchase boogiebids.com.

On the other hand, say you’re a family-owned locksmith and lock repair shop in the Queens. In a traditional brick-and-mortar store, a business like this would not necessarily hang a sign on its storefront that merely reads “Jimmy and Sons.” People who pass-by would never know what products or services Jimmy and Sons actually sells.

It would cause Jimmy and Sons to be perpetually overlooked by potential customers. It would, instead, be likely to have a giant storefront sign that says “Locksmith” and/or “We Repair Locks!” in Big and visible sign.

If Jimmy and Sons ever wanted to take the business online, a domain name like queenslockrepair.com would be a lot more useful to his customers than jimmy-and-sons.com.

It’s far more useful to have your main domain name describe your business rather than just parrot back its name, especially if the name is non-descript – just like a regular storefront.

Domain names which are short to the point, not only will help your customers more easily find you and understand what you have to offer, but since it’s likely to have at least one important keyword related to your business, it will help you in search engine ranking, also.

3. Which brings me to the third myth.

The more keywords I stuff in that domain name, the better I’ll do in the search engines. The reverse is actually true. I realize that in theory, you can have dozens of characters in your domain name, over 100 now. But both common sense and dozens of market studies show that the shorter domain names are more memorable and serve their respective sites more powerfully in the long run.

You should have at least one keyword in the domain name, but no more than four, and you should keep it to a length of no more than 20-25 consecutive letters (skip hyphens and the numbers – they’ll confuse your customers when trying to remember what to type into their browsers).

Ideally, it should be 10 or fewer, but those can be hard to come by, so just try to stick to the mantra that “less is more” and leave the majority of your search engine optimization efforts up to the web site content and design.

4. Buying a domain name is the same as buying web hosting.

This is actually one of the most common myths about domain names that I hear from clients seeking web design services. They have a great domain name, so they don’t understand why they need to purchase additional services for to get started programming their online store.

The reality is that web site hosting and domain names are two completely different services. If a domain name is the sign hanging on your storefront, a web host company is the landlord of your store’s actual space, to whom you pay rent every month in order to keep your business in that space.

Web hosting companies literally rent out space on their very, very large computers, called servers. When your site is done, you or your designer will put the files that make up your web site – the pages, the graphics, and anything else it might need – onto that server.

Purchasing the perfect hosting plan should also be inexpensive and uncomplicated, but it is involved enough to be a subject for an entirely different how-to guide, and does require a slightly greater understanding of technical specifications.

However, while both are crucial to the success of your online business, you generally can’t purchase a hosting plan without having a domain name first, and you shouldn’t purchase a hosting plan unless you know what technical requirements your web site will have, so securing a great domain name is the first step you should take.

5. My site can only have one domain name.

This largely depends on the type of web hosting plan you have, but just as a real store may have several descriptive signs on its storefront, your web site can have more than one domain name “pointing” to it.

Most of the competitive plans for the small business allow what’s known as “domain name aliasing” for at least 2 or 3 extra domain names for your business.

Having a domain name serve as the “alias” of another simply means that it goes to the same web site content as another domain name. For example, Jimmy and Sons could, if they wanted, have queenslockrepair.com as their site’s main domain name, and point nyclocksmith.com to the same site.

It doesn’t appear to help your site’s rankings in the search engines that much, but there are many reasons why you might want to purchase more than one domain name for your site: to own the dot-com, dot-net and dot-org versions of your domain name; to own common misspellings of your site’s main URL; to prevent competitors from having similar web site names as yours, and many other reasons. With the right hosting plan, the sky’s the limit.

With these five common misconceptions about domain name buying demystified, you should hopefully feel more confident about taking that first step toward purchasing a domain name for your business – and the first step toward setting up your very own successful shop in cyberspace.