Do You Own Your Domain?
Peter Brissette • Oct 23, 2018
Hey, everybody, Peter Brissette here, with the Monthly Marketing Message for you.
This month, what I wanna talk about is this simple question. Do you own your domain? I’m talking about your website domain. Do you own it? How do you know that you own your domain? The main question you have to answer is, is there a website where I can log in and have control over my domain? It’s my account, I can access it. Someone else doesn’t have the domain and have control of my domain, I have it.
As a business owner, this is a critically important question that you must have answered for yourself and for your business. You must maintain control of your domain. Now how do you know where your domain is and how you get access to it? So there’s a couple of ways that this works. The first thing that you can look at is … I’m gonna share my screen here. A website called whois.com. And I can come in here and put in my domain and do a search, and it’s gonna tell me who my registrar is. So what does registrar mean?
Registrar is the site or the company that has the registration of your domain. Now that is the one place where that’s basically controlled. Everything about your domain is controlled through that company. Now in my case, the Fast Domain is actually a part of Blue Host. So when I come down here, you can see in more detail the registrar’s server is Blue Host. So Fast Domain and Blue Host are kind of one in the same. Now there’s a difference between the registrar and the hosting. They’re not the same thing. So when I have a domain name that I own, I have a registrar that is the main company that controls that. That might be on godaddy, that might be on Blue Host, that might be on any number of domain registrars that register the domain information.
The second piece of that is your hosting. The hosting could be in completely different places. And hosting, all that hosting is is where do the files for my website actually sit. Where’s this computer, this file server, where my files are actually sitting right now? So you can have your domain controlled on godaddy, let’s say, but have your website hosted on Blue Host. So the files and everything are on Blue Host, but the main control of your domain and the ownership of your domain is in your godaddy account.
So the main thing that you have to focus on is going, “Okay, can I log in somewhere like godaddy and see my domain? I can renew my domain, I can change the settings on my domain, I can control that domain that way.” ‘Cause here’s the issue that comes up and we’ve seen this come up for many different clients where they decide they wanna change something on their website or get a new website and they’ve hired a new company to do that, a company like ours. And they have to give access to hosting, or give access to the domain. And suddenly the person who had it before is not happy about that and they’re not giving you access.
So the thing you have to remember is that you ultimately as the business owner, you own that property, that’s your property, the property of your business. Your domain name and your website. And if anyone starts to tell you that it doesn’t belong to you, it’s not yours, that person needs to be fired immediately and you need to move it to where you have complete control of it and someone cannot say that or do that as a part of your domain or your website.
So that’s the main thing I wanted to point out today in this month’s Marketing Message. Do you own your domain? Do you have control of your domain? Can you log in somewhere and get access to that domain so that you can direct it where you need to direct it? And then, where is it also hosted? And how do I get access to my hosting account? And again, do I have complete control of that hosting account if I so choose?
Now you may hire some company to host it and they may provide a list of services and that’s fine, but there should be a basic understanding that this belongs to you, as the business owner, not to the other company. So I hope you enjoyed this message this month. Please like, comment and share. Let me know if you have any questions. We’d be glad to help you out and we’ll talk to you next month.
The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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