How to Use New Domains in Creative Ways
Picture this: one of your customer support representatives is on the phone with a customer who’s looking for support for a product online. Instead of providing a long URL for the caller to type in, your representative tells them to just go to CompanyName.help.
This easy interchange is possible thanks to new Top Level Domains (or TLDs, the letters that appear to the right of the “dot” in a domain name). These TLDs have been recently introduced to the market and are available for general registration.
In this post, we’ll show you some helpful ways to use these domain names—even if your main website stays on .com.
Get Support
Who wants their main website to be littered with support documents?
Instead, try creating a separate site that contains all of the support information your customers need. This will give those customers who do need help a destination all their own and keeps your site’s main navigation structure clean and user-friendly.
Two great domains for this are .help and .support.
Promote Your Social Media
Make it easy for your fans and customers to explore all your various social media channels by aggregating them on one website. Using a <.social or .buzz domain name allows customers to choose the channels on which they prefer to follow you.
These domain names also make for great URL shorteners to use in social postings.
Open Your Store
Some businesses want to keep their online commerce activities separate from their main website. For example, a company that usually sells through suppliers might want to link to suppliers on their main website but offer a separate online store to sell direct.
There are many shopping-related top-level domains to choose from, including .shop and .store.
Highlight Customer Reviews
Customer reviews can effectively drive customers to (or away from) businesses. If your business has positive reviews, highlight these by aggregating reviews from other websites into one website. For example, a site can collate reviews from Yelp, Facebook, and Google and present them to the customer on a single page.
And what better way to highlight a reviews page than with a >.reviews domain?
Get to the Blog Faster
Many websites these days have blogs that are hard to find. They might carry a non-intuitive web address, for example, or are buried deep within a site. Consider IBM’s Blockchain blog posts, which can be found at developer.ibm.com/blockchain/blog/. That’s quite a mouthful.
That’s where a .blog TLD can come in handy. Register a shorter .blog name as a forwarding link to your actual blog.
It’s Easy Being Green
As your company gets bigger, it may be important to highlight your environmental stewardship or the work you do to offset your environmental impact. That’s the idea behind the two new top-level domain names, .green and .eco.
Registrants of the .eco domain can even get a profile page that highlights their company’s environmental record.
Easier Social URLs
Instead of giving out a long, cumbersome URL to your video and image accounts, make it easier with a short domain name.
For example, you can register a .video domain and forward it to your YouTube page. Want to have something memorable for Instagram for Flickr? Try .pics.
Be Creative!
There are literally hundreds of new top-level domain names, so look around and find one that suits your needs. Think about how you can incorporate these new names into your existing online strategy.
One of the easiest and most effective ways is to use them is as forwarders to long, complicated URLs. And remember, whenever you register a domain name at Namecheap, you get free forwarding. So get your creative juices flowing, and register your next domain at Namecheap today!
