You know how I’m always harping on you to GET THE RIGHT DOMAIN NAME and USE IT EVERYWHERE . . . right? I’d say this is one of the subjects I’m most ruthless about as your domain is your foundational element to everything you build in your website marketing world.

When I begin consulting with my clients, I start with how we can leverage the domain name, and what we can do to create better visibility for you in the Internet WITH your domain name (or a better one). 

 Do I take this to heart myself in my OWN Internet marketing? Apparently not.

When I first started my LagunaBeachBest.com blog, I had it under a different domain name – HotSpotsInLagunaBeach.com – until I realized that this was NOT a searched term as compared to the now existing domain, LagunaBeachBest.com . . . so I changed it up.

Given that I did this early in the site’s existence, I didn’t rattle the search engines’ cages too much, and thought I was doing just fine. When the HotSpots domain came up for renewal, I let it go. Who needs it, right?

Well … ahem … I did. OI VEY!!!

Here’s the scoop:

Yesterday, I was inputting some of my new LBB entries to TripAdvisor, Yelp and Urban Spoon (great social media leverage which I’ll talk to later).

On a whim, I started perusing my earlier entries at TripAdvisor, et al, from 2009 and, lo and behold, there at the bottom of every single one of my posts, I had this sentence:

“For more reviews on Laguna Beach, go to my website, www.HotSpotsInLagunaBeach.com “

 What an idiot I was! When I let that domain go, I didn’t even THINK about the hyperlinks I’d put in place in the grander scheme of social media! For three years now, more than 68 THOUSAND people at TripAdvisor, Yelp and Urban Spoon collectively have read those entries and perhaps clicked to  . . . nothing.

Thankfully, all those people are still clicking to nothing. Imagine if someone had actually built a site on that domain name!

Of course, there’s no editing to be done in these larger media directories once you’ve submitted an article. So, no other option – I scrabbled my way to GoDaddy in a heartbeat to buy the domain back. Turns out it’s up for auction as a “premier domain” and, what I originally spent $11 is now at lowest bid of $240. Did I bid for it? You bet I did. I need that domain back!

As of today, I won the auction and I have my domain back. I feel like throwing a party.

Now, the HotSpots domain will NOT become my primary (replacing www.LagunaBeachBest.com . . . . That would be suicide at this point – www.LagunaBeachBest.com has 59 cached pages recorded in Google – not 59 pages of my entries . . . 59 FULL pages in Google, meaning 59 x 9 entries per page = 531 cached entries for LagunaBeachBest.com . . . that’s pretty enormous for an 18-month-old site.

BUT! I can put the HotSpots domain on forwarding TO the LagunaBeachBest.com site. (This takes about 30 seconds to do.) So, anyone clicking the old domain will still end up in the right place.

Like I said, domain names are very serious business. If you’re looking to change yours, or wonder which domain you should be using from an assortment, feel free to email me for my quick research and appraisal.