.co domains – are they worth it?

September 26, 2010 Online Reputation Management, Twitter, Website Strategy No Comments

For £30 a year you can have a .co domain name. 

Does that sound expensive?  If so, read on …

Over a year ago, the Custwin email newsletter encouraged people to grab available Twitter names while they were still available.   That message clearly didn’t get out to enough people and since then I’ve seen many examples of companies who can’t tweet as their company name because someone else (probably competitors in many cases) have snapped them up.

Going back much further there was a land grab on standard domain names, although the range of names available was obviously much bigger than the limitations of Twitter names.  But the principle was the same – grab good domain names while they’re available.

So along comes the .co domains you can buy, and with it a heftier price tag at £30 per year.  Let’s look at a few reasons why you may think it’s worth buying a good .co name while you still have the opportunity …

1. You want to ensure that competitors don’t trade off your name in the future.  So, if your company is called Widgets for Midgets and you already have www.widgetsformidgets.co.uk and www.widgetsformidgets.com then you may feel quite safe.  But what if the widgets market gets more competitive and someone comes along and decides to trade off your name by buying widgetsformidgets.co?   They create a nicer looking website, do their SEO and other marketing better, and suddenly they’re pulling in a load of traffic that should really be yours.  If you’ve not protected your company name in any way then there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
2. You have a crystal ball.  You don’t quite know why yet, but you feel that by having one or more .co domains, it could be beneficial in the future.  Look at all those who bought numerous domains years ago, some gaining financially from then selling them on to buyers who needed them.  All those Twitter names that people have registered and are keeping active – will they be of use some day?  Who knows, and although there’s no guarantees, it’s just possible that .co domains could be beneficial in the future.   

   After all, stranger things have happened – who would have expected HMRC to write off up to £1.5bn of unpaid tax, as in the news this week?

3. In a personal capacity, you may want to create a personal brand for yourself in the future.  Many of the big names in business (and other spheres of influence) use their names as their brands.  So, let’s say your name is Jane Smith and you’re going to create something fantastic and your name is going to be your brand (potentially).  You may not have a clue how you’re going to create this personal brand, or when it’ll happen, but if you don’t grab your janesmith.co name right now then it’ll be gone by the time that you want to use it.   And yes, quite surprisingly, at the time of writing this, www.janesmith.co IS available, as are so many other name variations.

   Just in case you think “it couldn’t happen to me”, the two screen grabs below show that (as at 26th September), Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, are up for grabs as .co names (although David Cameron has been snapped up, presumably by someone with a bit of foresight).