Andy Black
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Given it's for courses and likely a worldwide market then I'd go with a .com if you can. The danger is that people will tell other people to go to yourdomain(.)net and folks will forget it's a .net and go to the .com.I am planning on creating a website for my online courses, which are doing quite well on a few course marketplaces. The website will host my courses and allow users to purchase courses or sign up to a membership. However, trying to find a decent .com domain below $2000 is quite a challenge.
What is your opinion on this? Do you think a .com domain is a must for a business to be taken seriously? Or will another domain be just as good?
I'm going to put a lot of effort into this website and will promote it on my YouTube channel, so I want to get it right first time.
I appreciate your thoughts on this.
It's easy enough finding available .com domains with a bit of thinking. There's threads in the forum already about coming up with domain names.
My thoughts in a nutshell:
1) Make the name "brandable"
- Don't call it something that is a common search term. This means people might be running ads on your "brandname".
- e.g. if you called your brand "forklift courses" and the domain was forkliftcourses(.)com then you'll have ads appear when folks search for "forklift courses", and it will be hard to rank for your "brandname".
2) You could go random and just string a few common words together that are easy to say and spell
- A school of thought is for the domain/brandname to be vague and for the tagline to be super specific.
- You can change the tagline within seconds, but not the domain name.
- This allows you to pivot in future.
- e.g. hotjar, crazyegg, luckyorange, skillshare, etc.
- Others are made up words or just single words: udemy, fiverr, upwork, amazon, google, facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, uber.
3) Or you could give a nod to the niche, but allow yourself to pivot the content in future by not naming it too specific
- e.g. DesignAcademy(.)com is for learning since you use the word "academy", and it's about design. It's vague enough to allow you to extend from just technical lessons to "how to get work as a designer" lessons. Oh, and you could extend to any topic where people design things, including even lifestyle design I suppose.
Example domains I bought over the years for courses and other purposes (that mostly have nothing on them at the moment):
- Skilltack(.)com
- Subspring(.)com
- SubscriberGrowth(.)com
- JumpstartPPC(.)com
- StreetSmartPPC(.)com
- FreelanceAndBeyond(.)com
- InboundMarketeer(.)com
- StartSellScale(.)com
- This is sufficiently focused for people interested in sales, marketing, and business ... while not being specific about Google Ads or marketing. It allows me to put any business related courses onto it.
I would have liked to AndyBlack(.)com but settled for AndyBlack(.)net - I figure folks looking for me by name realise the Andy Black on the .com isn't the Andy Black they were looking for.
Oh, and my YouTube channel (currently?) is a personal branded one, and I'll lead people to AndyBlack(.)net where there are (currently) links to free content, a free workshop (my lead magnet), and my courses membership.
It's deliberately simple for the moment and looks like this: