Recently we’ve been going through all our domain names. Since all our Lyrical Host ones are due to renew soon, we decided to do a big audit of everything we have to see what we actually want to keep.
It turns out we registered thirty nine different domain names for Lyrical Host (!!)
We’ve decided to keep about half of them, but the others we’re just going to let drop. They’re all just used for redirects and some of them are fairly obscure, so we don’t need them. It’s funny because at the time I remember wondering if we’d registered enough. (Yes, yes we did).
So how many domain names do you realistically need for your brand? A lot of it comes down to personal preference, but it’s also about how important your brand is. For example, for a little blog like Star Girl, I don’t have any other similar variants registered. Lyrical Host is much more important, and is a commercial website on top of that, so therefore a lot more protection is needed for type-in traffic, word of mouth referrals, and potential domain squatters or phishers.
The middle ground, in my opinion, is something like this:
- The .com version of your name.
- The regional variant if it’s big for your location, like .co.uk or .uk.
- Either or both of the above with a hyphen, if your domain is two words (double or triple hyphens are a bit much!).
- A URL shortener, for example I have jen.to and lyri.cl).
That’s not too many…definitely not 39!!
You can get away with fewer if you have a strong presence in another area. For example, if people know you from Twitter or YouTube, they will probably head to your channels their first before heading to your website. You can also put a bunch of call to actions and features for people to subscribe via email or RSS, so that way you don’t have to worry about them remembering your name or getting to the right place.
Want to buy some domains? Head over to Lyrical Host and we’ll be happy to help!
