A good domain name is essential to build credibility in real estate investing. It is crucial if you want to succeed and for people to trust you.
We’ve discussed how having a professional website for your multi-family investing business can give you credibility. Another part of that is having the right domain name.
What Is a Domain?
A domain name is basically your website address, like YourBusinessName.com.
To get a domain name, you go to a site like NameCheap and type in the domain name you want and they will let you know if that name is available or not.
With apartment investing, most often you’ll want to use your business name as the domain name. For example, if your business name is Premier Apartment Investments, LLC, you might want to get a domain name like PremierApartmentInvestments.com, PremierInvestments.com, or PremierApartmentInvestmentsLLC.com.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s good to keep domain names as short as possible and try to avoid things that are hard to spell because it can help avoid the problem of people typing your website address incorrectly. If your prospects try going to your site and type it in wrong, most likely they won’t end up on your website. They may not get any website at all, or they may get some other website besides yours. Either way, it’s not good.
What to Do If a Name is Taken
If the domain name you want is already taken, try other variations. Sometimes it can be good to search for the domain name before registering your business entity. The reason is maybe someone in another state has a similar business name and they may already have the website address you want. If you search for that first and find that the domain you want is not available, you might consider a different business name where you can get a domain name to match it.
When you register a domain name, you pay by the year. You can pay for multiple years at a time if you want. It’s good to keep up with when the domain will expire because if your domain name expires, not only will your website go down, but someone else could even register the domain name and you’ll lose it.
Where to Get a Domain
There are many companies you could go through to register your domain name, but they are not all equal. It’s generally best to go with a big, well-established company like NameCheap. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, they’re more likely to be around for years down the road. But, more importantly, some of the domain companies make it hard or impossible to change the settings you need to be able to change to point the domain name to your website.
I’ve had clients in the past that have used companies I’ve never heard of for their domain names, and in some cases, the only option was to transfer to a different company. So by trying to save a couple of bucks, you might end up paying double. If you just go with one of the bigger companies, you can avoid those issues and only have to do it once.
Best Practices
When it comes to choosing your domain name, it’s best whenever possible, to go with a “.com” domain rather than any of the other options out there, like “.net”, “.biz”, etc. Dotcom looks most professional and it’s what people expect for a business. When you see some of the newer options, like “.club” or “.agency”, people may not even realize it’s a website address. You don’t want to confuse people. And even if you tell them otherwise, they often end up typing “.com” at the end anyway, rather than the other extension. So you could be sending them to someone else’s website.
If you don’t yet have a domain name for your business, you can grab one from NameCheap. Even if you’re not quite ready to move forward with your website for whatever reason, securing your domain name will prevent someone else from getting it. This way you’ll have it when you’re ready.
Whatever your plans might be, your website will continue to be the single most important aspect and hub of all your online marketing activity. If you need help establishing and online presence and getting your website up and running, the team at Apartment Investor Pro have you covered.
ApartmentInvestorPro sites are designed specifically for real estate investors. They can be easily customized for your needs. And they come at a fraction of the cost you would incur if you had your site built from scratch.