Market your local domain names	2.0/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin January 23, 2009

Most small businesses these days know that they need an online presence. How can you tap into that need and build up local clients that can lead you to bigger clients over time?

Small business needs an online presence

I was at my local dentist recently and he is very much in love with technology. He has all the latest high tech gear in dentistry including equipment to mill crowns for you while you wait. I was interested then to talk to him about his website.

His website is probably typical of many with each page pretty much disconnected from the last and no real overarching theme. He was missing critical things like contact information on every page and yet the dental office will text me in advance to remind me of my dental appointments.The website stood in stark contrast to the high tech dental office that still retains a local friendly atmosphere.

He was quite embarrassed about the website and said he kept meaning to get it redone. However when I asked what he wanted changed, he was more concerned with putting up the latest case files than making it a high quality business site. Clearly this highly intelligent technophile needs more information and education on domain names and website development.

Educating local businesses

It stuck me that one way to educate and thus create an appreciation of domain names and website development is to join small business associations and offer to speak at such meetings. There are business clubs, breakfast networking meetings and so on. Offering to talk about these subjects for free should help raise awareness and pay off in business gained over time. Since you are a small business owner yourself, you will be talking to your peers.

From talking to some small business owners local to me, it seems that the best way to market to them is to combine the domain name with website development as a package. If you already have the website development skills, then you are ready to go.

If you do not want to develop their website or do not know how to, you can partner with a local development company. Before you approach such a company, make sure you have a quality portfolio of relevant generic domain names for your local businesses. Even if they already have their business name as their domain, you can push a generic name to help with their marketing efforts and for SEO purposes.

If you develop their website, be prepared to support the website for appropriate remuneration on a continuing basis or contract with someone to do it for you. If you partner with a good website development company, then you can make domain name sales without the ongoing hassle of website maintenance.

Local education becomes global education

Such a local effort to educate businesses, if done well, will spread by word of mouth and benefit you by bringing in new business and benefit the industry by raising awareness of the value of domain names.

This is the kind of grass roots revolution or movement that can lead to solid growth for you and for the industry and in giving back to the community through education, it helps fight the stigma that domaining can get stuck with.

In my view, it is these kinds of efforts that can evolve domaining into a mature industry and I am sure there are plenty more ideas along these lines out there.

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