For the second time in about 6 months I’ve had clients come to me distraught because they lost their site’s domain. Yes – they lost it. Just as gone as if you had a brick and mortar storefront and a fire raged through it, burning up every little piece of your business.
All because they didn’t renew their domain registration.
So basically they lost everything because they didn’t pay $2-15 to to the company that held their domain registration – GoDaddy, Network Solutions, any of the “cheap domain” sites out there – these clients just didn’t pay – and it cost them their entire website. In fact, one company had paid $3,000 to acquire the domain 3 years ago – and now it’s gone because they didn’t renew the domain.
There are plenty of people out there – domainers – who troll around, looking for domains that expire. The ones that are the most valuable have been “aged” and include content and plenty of backlinks – one client lost a domain they had had for 11 years. According to Google, age, links and content mean something, so when a domainer snatches up an aged domain they’re already at an advantage. So they put their ads up there and you end up with nothing to show for it. An even worse case is someone buys your expired domain and then attempts to sell it back to you for hundreds or thousands of dollars. For some companies that’s a price they’re willing to pay.
The sad thing is, there’s a simple fix – Auto-Renew. When you register a domain – especially if it’s one that will be used for your entire company – letterhead, business cards, brochures – just click that little box that says “Yes! I want to make sure I don’t have to think about this ever again, so please just automatically bill me $x this time every year.”
That’s all you need to do – that one simple checkbox would have saved both of these companies a lot of grief.
GoDaddy is pretty great about letting you know – multiple times – that you’re about to lose your domain as well. You will start getting emails that look like this that will give you plenty of time to actually log in and renew your domain… Pay attention to these emails. Log in right away and renew your domain (if you don’t listen to my first bit of advice and put it on auto-renew).
So I have a request – please, right now, log into the account that holds your domain registration and make sure they’re set to Auto-renew. And then, call me and let’s talk about how you can spend the money you saved by averting a crisis on growing your business.
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