There's a lot to branding your business in sync with your domain name and I'm just going to discuss a few key points that begin with the letter A.

Authority and Affinity

Being a brand authority now of days is having a powerful domain name.  Powerful domain names are valuable because they are memorable and reflect your business as a leader in your industry.  Like it or not we live in the age of information overload, and that's a good thing.  As a kid I would ride my bike back and forth to the library trying to juggle a stack of books, knowledge and products from all over the world are now at anyone's finger tips from just about anywhere.  How does a customer find, return to, or recommend your business in a sea of 1.7 billion websites all competing for the first page of Google?  This is why your domain name matters.

Affinity is the sense of the natural path to your business, a relationship to or the path of the least resistance.  If a customer has to remember your domain name or apply a silly extension, not only are they going to have a hard time getting back to you, it's even more difficult for them to refer your company to their contacts.  Word of mouth is still a powerful tool in growing your business.

Here's a few great articles on the subject of branding and why your domain name matters: Spend Less on SEO, More on a Memorable Brand by Jamie Zoch and The True Cost of Your Domain Name by Chris Zuiker.

One point I would add to both of these articles is that not acquiring your matching domain name is leaving the door open for your competition to purchase it.  Some companies have spent millions just to keep their competition from having them.

This article is by Kasssey Lee on TLfDInvestors.com originally from GrandSeeds.com

Your domain is the address of your store in the digital world. If consumers remember what you sell and where to buy it, that’s powerful marketing. Your brand helps them remember what you sell, and your domain helps them remember where to buy it. Therefore, you want your domain to be easily remembered. The easiest way to remember your domain is to make it match your brand.

It's never too late to get the matching domain name, it just gets more expensive.

Match Your Brand to Your Domain Name

A nice case study about Zelle.com expressed on DotWeekly.com about matching your brand to your domain name. There are a couple of other articles about the importance of branding on Dotweekly that a worth the read.  And the tag line says it all, It's More Than a Name. With your domain name the goal is to make your brand stronger, not weaker.  In addition to branding, author and operator of DotWeekly Jamie Zoch provides some other great info on the domain industry regularly, be sure to follow up on domain movers and start ups.

Branding and the relation to your domain name cannot be stated enough for design into your website and the success of your business.  If you can, acquire the domain names for your products, too.

Brand Building is Web Development

When setting out to develop a new website for a client the first thing to consider is their brand. Defining a brand is a lot like writing a business plan for an organization. Who's their customer, what is their demographic, current corporate culture and visibility across all media along with consistency regarding these representations. Sometimes a client expects development of a website to be just stamping out code, but it's much more artistry and expertise than that going on to get it right. I wouldn't just start nailing boards together if I were a builder, the site, direction, watershed, parking, permits and a 100 other items need to be considered before breaking ground. The same holds true for web development and I would recommend reading up on these sites listed below about building your brand before developing the wrong site for your business.

First, have or get the right domain name. Brandgy.com can clue you in as to why that's so important. Learn about branding your business with these no nonsense guides available through HowToBuildABrand.org These folks out of the UK know what they are doing and it's explained in a way that you can see how it effects other facets of your business. SearchEngineJournal.com puts the technical edge on your brand strategy. Their site maybe a good read for the more technically inclined, but getting found is what it's all about going forward into 2018 and beyond.