Purchasing only one single domain name can, over time, prove costly. Obtain a variety of domain names for your online business and you will never regret that decision.

Here are the key benefits for having more than one domain name for your business:

1. Expansion: Should your business go global and branch into international markets then it is important to have country specific domains, eg, .au, co.nz, or co.uk. Country specific domains readily inform your audience of your presence in those countries where the domain name resides.

2. Misspellings: It is important that users can find your site. If your business name can be spelled in different ways or is susceptible to misspelling, then it is good business decision to register misspelled domain names. Allowing for misspellings or variants of the name will mean you can direct users who misspell your business name to the right destination instead of sending visitors to an error page or worst to a competition.

3. Competition: Acquiring more than one domain name for your business can protect you from parasitic competitors from registering a similar domain name and thus grabbing a share of your market.

4. Search: A website which has many associated domain names is easier to find. Customers have different ways of finding a website in the internet. Give customers as many options as you can to find you by using different domain names.

5. Brand: Protecting your brand and online identity is essential for any online business. Securing a variety of names will inevitably boost your brand presence.

6. Traffic: Purchasing keyword rich domains is a traffic-generator strategy. The traffic attracted by these search engine discoverable domains can be directed to your main domain.

Emanila.com Pty Ltd, an Australian company, is an example of an internet company that uses various domain names.

In addition to emanila brand series like emanilapoetry.com, emanilaclassifieds.com, emanilavideos.com, etc., the following domain names are associated with emanila: emanila.com, emanila.net, emanila.org, emanila.info, emanila.asia, emanila.biz, emanila.mobi, emanila.tv, emanila.ws, emanila.us, e-manila.com, e-manila.biz, e-manila.info, e-manila.net, e-manila.org, and emanila.com.au.

With these domain names, emanila has been able to establish a dominant presence in its own market and has been able to protect its brand by registering for itself variations of its own domain name.

We did not even bother to give those invitation letters a second look as (a) the prices quoted are way out of this world (5 times higher than what others are charging), (b) we did not find the need to register the .net.au version of our domains, and (c) we are no great fan of the “free iPod shuffle” which according to the invitation comes with the two year registration.

Now after almost two years, we are still receiving those letters in our mailbox. Quickly checking what others think about these invitation letters, Google spilled out hundreds of thousands of pages on our search keyphrase “domainnamegroup.com.au.”

Their verdict? The operation of “Domain Name Group” is a scam.

Here are some comments written about this scam:

The letter is made to look very much like an invoice with a tear off tab below for easy payment and all.

It has your company name up the top as if you are a client of theirs and also a reference number too so you think you are on their books.

They make it sound as if you need to register this domain name which is, for instance a .net.au variation of your existing domain (.com.au). The price is $245 for 2 years!!! A real bargain. Source: Domain Name Group – Be Warned

I take pity on the general public. How would the average Joe Blow realise that this letter is not what it first looks like? The more I look the more obvious it is; but in an office environment I’m certain a quick glance and processing by a non-technical person will pay out most times. Source: domainnamegroup.com.au is a scam

This group is sending out invoices for payment of domain registration for a .net.au version of their .com.au domains. The invoice appears as a renewal invoice for the original domain name, and is misleading customers with a call to action to pay for the domain registration by offering an iPod if paid by a particular date.

This group harvested postal address information belonging to ACN/ABN owners of the .com.au domain equivalents. The way the group acquired the addresses was simply by searching public Whois database for .au domains, and then used the ACN/ABN details to search for the postal address details via other available online resources. Source: Warning: Domain Registration Scam from “Domain Name Group Pty Ltd” – July 2010

Our advice: If you receive this type of invitation letter from Domain Name Group, chuck it in the bin.

1. The name passes the so-called “radio test.” By this is meant that the domain name can be understood if said on the radio. Try to avoid domain names with dash or hyphen (”-”) or underscore (”_”) as part of the names. One needs to spell out the whole domain name with the dash, hyphen or underscore which sometimes sound very awkward.

You must have heard of radio commercials of websites where the site names are spelled out. This is because they have the names with hyphen or the names have been so over-stylised that they need to be spelled out. For example: Some domain names use “ozzie” instead of “aussie” that the owner or whoever is saying it has to tell the listeners the domain name letter-by-letter.

2. Easy to remember. Like any product name, the domain name should be easy to remember. Which one would you easily remember? ONLYINAUSTRALIA.COM or ONLYINAUST.COM?

3. The domain name is descriptive. The domain should at least give an idea of the type of site it is. For example, a site name like INTERNETPROPERTIESBROKER.COM is quite descriptive.

4. The domain name contains keywords. SEO experts claim that getting a website listed higher in search engines is made easier if a domain as well as its content contain searchable keywords. And the less keywords a domain contains, more instances of it will be shown in search results. Example: SENDMAIL.COM.AU could generate more traffic than FASTSENDMAIL.COM.AU

5. If you have a choice, choose a .com extension (or for a regional TLD, example, .com.au) as this extension stands a better chance of being searched than the same domain name with different extension. This is simply because most people are more familiar with .com over other extensions. The .com has become sort of a household name. That said, it does not mean that other extensions will not work well. We know a number of successful websites using other extensions like .net, .org, and .info. An example of a successful website with a .net extension is TEXTCAFE.NET.

By the way: The websites operating under the domain names SENDMAIL.COM.AU, ONLYINAUSTRALIA.COM, INTERNETPROPERTIESBROKER.COM, and TEXTCAFE.NET are affiliates of this website.