Forwarding Domains: Send Visitors to Your Website with a Custom URL

Purchasing a forwarding domain forwards visitors to your website, and is an easy way to increase the usability and your site. When you purchase your forwarding domain, keep it as simple and easy to remember as possible.

If you have a long URL that's hard to remember or type, purchasing a forwarding domain is a simple solution to your problem. It can result in more visitor traffic and much better branding for your web based business, on your business cards, your online profiles, and anywhere else where people might see your website URL and want to remember it.

Simplify your web name for customers!

Using a forwarding domain isn't expensive, and the benefits far outweigh the minimal cost of purchasing a domain. Here are just a few ideas of what you can do with your forwarding domain:

Reasons to Use a Forwarding Domain

Shorten your web address (URL) by purchasing a domain and changing the forwarding address to your super-long URL. For example, your website is http://www.thelongesturlontheplanet.com/members/bill, and you'd like to give visitors an easier way to type this in. Purchase anything that relates to your site that people will remember, like shortdomain.com, and your customers won't have a tough time typing it in.

• Easier advertising on business cards, flyers, and on the web
• Better branding for your website/business
• Easier to remember name

The site I use to purchase all of my forwarding domains is GoDaddy. They're easy to use, they're cheap, and they have automatic notifications when you need to renew your domain. Other companies I've dealt with don't send notifications, and can be problematic to deal with, but I haven't had a problem with GoDaddy. I do earn a small commission if you purchase through the link in this paragraph (hyperlinked GoDaddy).

Optimize your linking strategy!

When using forwarding domains, it's important to remember you really want the search engines to notice the website you are forwarding visitors to, not the actual forwarding domain. For example, if you've created a banner for your website, or if you've linked to your website somewhere on the web, link to the actual website, not the forwarding domain. Here's what the HTML code might look like when you are creating this link:

The point is, you want to direct all of your search engine marketing efforts to link to your actual domain, not the forwarding domain. The forwarding domain is an empty website with a redirect to another page, so telling search engines to visit that page will be telling them to visit an empty page!

So, what you should be linking to is the page itself. Pretend you never had a forwarding domain, and link to that page. The forwarding domain should be used for business cards, promotions, emails, verbal conversations, etc. Online, use the real URL.

Buy your domain from a trusted company

There are a number of easy to use, reliable web hosting companies that can allow you to forward a purchased domain to another. HostGator, GoDaddy, and BlueHost are reliable, and very simple to forward.

To forward your domain with any of these companies, log into your new account and click on the account manager/domain manager section. There will be a section for domain forwarding, and you simply type in the URL of the website! Be sure to include the entire URL copied and pasted from your web page.

This process is especially simple with GoDaddy.

I have seen other domain websites try to force you to pay extra to forward your domains to another website, which is an absolute ripoff.

This book outlines some of the basic steps you can take right down to the more complex to start advertising your small business online. In this day and age, you need to advertise online to gain a foothold over the other guys! Explode your growth online and start selling!