Is Your Domain Name Cheating On You?

There are three different ways.So I talk about the seven dimensions of how a domain impacts a brand. There are three ways that your domain could be cheating on you.

The first way is your domain name it’s sending traffic to another company. And yes, this happens all the time. It happens when you add words, you call yourself one brand, but you’re something else.

I use the example Nitro quite a bit, where there is nitro boats, nitro software, and many other Nitro’s. You can use Kraken, there’s Kraken Rum and then there is Kraken Crypto Exchange.These brands are very close to each other. But… Only one brand can control the raw unfiltered positioning of Nitro.com or Kraken.com. Or maybe you add an LLC, maybe you’re adding a try, maybe you’re adding a get.

Inevitably what happens is that you end up sending that traffic back. A portion of that, a halo of that to another company. There was one time I saw a company that had; I think it was 25,000 extra visitors a day coming in because another company did some TV commercial, and their domain was confusing. However, here’s the thing, they had no idea. They had no idea their domain was cheating on them. They had no idea their advertising was cheating on them, and that their marketing was cheating on them. So that’s the number one.

Are you sending traffic to another company?

Is your domain communicating behind your back?

Believe it or not, this happens all the time where when you create confusion, when you don’t own your raw unfiltered, exact match domain name, the raw unfiltered version of your brand. You end up sending traffic and sending emails to another company.

I need to discuss the domain I own!

I had a CEO once of a company that had an LLC on the end of the brand, and they actually sent an email to the wrong company.  They sent it to our clients company. The CEO sent this email to his secretary, and it was a sensitive email, along with sensitive PowerPoints and documents.  You would think the CEO would get his own email address and domain correct.

Listen, it takes five minutes to set up a catch-all email address.And by the way, hey you’re the one that’s the problem, because you’re spamming this other company, okay.

So number two is, are you sending emails to another company?

There’s a great example in the news recently where Dunkin Donuts, was actually taking off the donuts, because I think because they’re pivoting and expanding into lunch and beyond donuts. However, the Donuts was keeping them boxed in.

Another example is Zen Payroll.

They rebranded to Augusto.com. There are quite a bit of articles out there on why they did it.

However, they did it because they wanted to expand beyond payroll, and that was boxing them in. So that happens quite a bit.

Make sure your domain name is not cheating on you. If you have not downloaded my book “.Com Strategies” do it today.