• Instant credibility and respect. Let potential clients instantly know that you’re serious about what you’re doing.
• Easy to remember. They might forget some brands but always remember the products/services name, example Books.com, Loans.com
• Stand out of the crowd, branding and marketing as the market leader.
• Drives targeted traffic to your web site based on keyword searches relating to your brand identity, products and/or services.
• Takes traffic away from competing web sites that are only using a domain name based on a company name or vanity name, not keywords used by potential visitors searching for your products or services.
• Attract type-in traffics (web site traffic that has come directly from users typing into their browser’s address bar).
• Dominate search engines, web sites with keyword-rich domains have better chances of being listed at top positions in search engine results.
• Investment value, high quality generic domains have huge upside potential.
• Drive hundreds or thousands of potential new clients to a company’s website on a daily basis, at no additional cost via search engines / type-ins

Many large companies have already purchased generic domains, because they want to benefit from owning a premium .com domain name:

• Adobe – Director.com, Flash.com
• Amazon – Endless.com
• American Express – Open.com
• AOL – Games.com
• AT&T – Mobile.com, WebHosting.com
• Bank of America – Loans.com
• Barnes and Noble – Book.com, Books.com
• Bayer – Aspirin.com, MultipleSclerosis.com
• Burlington Coat Factory – Coat.com
• Citibank – Finance.com, Mortgage.com, StudentLoan.com
• CNET – Download.com, Help.com, News.com, TV.com
• CNN/Time Inc. – Money.com, Mutual-Funds.com
• Corel – Designer.com
• Daimler AG – TruckStore.com
• Dell – CloudComputing.com
• Disney – Family.com, Kid.com
• ESS Data Recovery – DataRecovery.com
• Fandango – Movie.com, Movies.com
• Fidelity – 401k.com, Funds.com
• G&J Holdings – Candy.com
• General Electric – AutoLeasing.com
• Google – Android.com, Hello.com
• Health Magazine/Time Inc. – Health.com
• History Channel – History.com
• Honda – Motorcycles.com
• HRS – Hotel-Reservation.com
• Intel – Chips.com
• Intuit – Banking.com, Payroll.com
• JC Penny – Gift.com
• Johnson and Johnson – Baby.com, Cancer.com
• K-Swiss – TennisShoes.com
• Microsoft – Docs.com, GPS.com, Investor.com, Juice.com, Office.com, Start.com, TV.net
• Monster – Jobs.com
• Office Depot – OfficeSupplies.com, School.com
• Oracle – Retail.com, Sales.com, Think.com
• Philips – SemiConductors.com, Speech.com
• Procter and Gamble – DentalCare.com, Nails.com, Tissue.com, Toothpaste.com
• Ralph Lauren – Polo.com, Rugby.com
• Société Générale – Warrants.com
• Sun Microsystems – Network.com, ServiceProvider.com
• T-Mobile – Aerial.com
• Toys-R-Us – Toys.com
• Travelocity – Vacations.com
• Weather Channel – Weather.com
• Wedding Channel – Weddings.com
• Wells Fargo – Strong.com
• Xerox – ColorPrinters.com, Documents.com
• Zappos – Clothes.com

On the World Wide Web your domain name is your own unique identity. No two parties can ever hold the same domain name simultaneously; therefore your Internet identity is totally unique. If you have a business site on the Internet your domain name is your own online brand and in a sense you can use your domain name as your online business card. With your own domain name your web site, and e-mail addresses for example will have that professional look, being unique to your business. Many people often miss the importance of having and then keeping their domain name until they lose it. Once this happens they soon realize that they have lost their whole online identity. How does a domain name work?

To understand why you need a domain name you first need to know how a domain name works.

A domain name is an addressing construct, used for finding and identifying computers on the Internet. Computers use Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses, which are a series of numbers used to identify each other on the Internet; however, many people find it hard to remember IP Addresses. Because of this, domain names were developed so that easily remembered names and phrases could be used to identify entities in the Internet instead of using an IP Address.

For example, the domain name M6.net identifies the company M6.net. When a user types the domain name M6.net in their browser or sends an email to M6.net, the Domain Name System (DNS) will translate the domain name into IP numbers. These are then used by the Internet to connect the user to M6.net’s web presence.

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A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are hostnames that identify Internet Protocol (IP) resources such as web sites. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS).

Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. They are organized in subordinate levels (subdomains) of the DNS root domain, which is nameless. The first-level set of domain names are the top-level domains (TLDs), including the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as the prominent domains com, net and org, and the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Below these top-level domains in the DNS hierarchy are the second-level and third-level domain names that are typically open for reservation by end-users that wish to connect local area networks to the Internet, run web sites, or create other publicly accessible Internet resources. The registration of these domain names is usually administered by domain name registrars who sell their services to the public.

Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, or hostnames. Hostnames are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as a component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as web sites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org).

Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of a resource. Such examples are the realm identifiers used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the DomainKeys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

An important purpose of domain names is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet. Such a move usually requires changing the IP address of a resource and the corresponding translation of this IP address to and from its domain name.

Domain names are often referred to simply as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners, although domain name registration with a registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the top-level development and architecture of the Internet domain name space. It authorizes domain name registrars, through which domain names may be registered and reassigned. The use of domain names in commerce may subject strings in them to trademark law. In 2010, the number of active domains reached 196 million according to Verisign report.

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