Adding a Domain Name to Your Blog

You might have done as I did and created a blog (or more than one) in your main domain. For example, when someone wanted to go to my Flash in the Pan blog, they'd have had to type:

www.eriksherman.com/the-pan

However, that looks pretty clumsy. But it turns out that there's something you can do. I went to GoDaddy and got the domain FlashInThePan.org. Then I forwarded

http://www.flashinthepan.org/

to my blog and used masking (a feature built into the forwarding system) to have "Flash in the Pan" pop up on a browser instead of the longer URL. Click on each link to see the difference. This approach gives you a way to add a domain after the fact and even expand a blog site so that you could actually sell the domain name in the future if you wished. Note that this feature is probably available at many domain registration and hosting companies.

Here's another thing to consider: if you want to keep multiple blogs, or even multiple sites, you can use this domain name redirection trick to have all the people who think they are going to different sites to actually end up at the same domain. Although I don't know for sure, I'm pretty sure this starts driving up statistics on your whole domain, and will help drive up search engine results for anything on any of the sites.

Uncover Cybersquatters

As you become better known, you may become the target of cybersquatters. These are people who try to capture traffic that would otherwise go to your web site. Their intent might be to see if they can make online ad revenue from the diverted audience, to twist your arm into buying the rights to the domain, or even to pull a scam.

Ideally you should have registered other variations of your domain, such as .net, .org, .biz, and so on. To see if you're covered your bases, go to the Internic Whois server, which lets you look for different domain names, and check variations on your domain name.

Next, see if there are any typosquatters - people who try to anticipate how people might misspell a domain name or type in a good, but wrong, guess as to what it might be. BCI Law Group has a free tool that will do various searches.

If you're doing work on a corporate website, this can be a valuable extra value service you can toss in to help build good will and alert the client to potential problems.