This time, a general branding tip that applies to everyone in business, whether you’re a speaker or not. Your email address! What does it say about you? Do you look like a professional or an amateur?
What looks more professional to you?:
AnastasiaVioletLipske@gmail .com?
AwesomeEntrepreneur@aol .com?
AccessSpeakers@yahoo .com?
Anastasia@AccessSpeakers .biz?
I think we all know it would be the latter because I’m branding my name and my business. Once glance at this and people know I’m a professional and as a bonus, they can deduce that my website is AccessSpeakers.biz.
And BTW, whether it’s .com or .biz or .net makes no difference in how professional you look. There are various reasons to choose certain endings, but please don’t grab .org unless you’re a non-profit or .xxx unless you want another type of client – ha ha!
The below article is great for explaining why a professional/custom email address matters in how you are presenting yourself and gives instructions on just how to go about creating one so you can better brand you and your business.
How to Create an Email: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Custom Email Address
by firstsiteguide
And as I mentioned in my video above, if you haven’t reviewed the below Speaker Snippet I did a short while back about upgrading your email signature I highly suggest you do.
Speaker Snippets – Email Signatures, Are you Using Them Effectively?
by ME 🙂
For those of you who want to DIG further into website names/domains…here’s a bit more for you…
The .com – .biz – .org – .net – etc. is referred to as a TLD (top level domain) and many people are getting very creative with them i.e. you can now brand the TLD with something like .pizza and a whole host of other options.
There are reasons to do that, but I would caution you against getting too fancy and in all honesty, if there are too many options out there I feel it muddles things. It’s hard enough to get someone to remember your web address much less expect them to remember a unique, almost random TLD.
I wish I could’ve grabbed .com when I started my business more than seven years ago, but back when I grabbed my current domain (AccessSpeakers) someone else already the .com even though their company had a very different name. It was a speakers bureau that clearly just purchased a ton of domains related to speaking and had them all point to their actual site. Now AccessSpeakers.com is available for purchase, but people are more familiar with .biz now so I’m not going to bother.
You need to decide for yourself whether you want to go with the basics or something fancy, but you might consider purchasing a few domains that cover a variety of TLDs that all point back to your main site.
Here’s a basic article that may be helpful:
What are the five most common domain extensions and which one should I use?
by GoDaddy
And here’s a much more in-depth article for those of you who really like to delve:
How to pick the right domain extension
by iwantmyname
Lastly, a shameless plug for my consulting services. Even speakers with top-notch professional branding could benefit from having the eyes of a speaker agent look over what they’ve got to make sure they aren’t missing any opportunities to be more loud and proud about being a speaker. I would be honored if you would trust me with your time to share my expertise with you.
Here’s a testimonial from another speaker consulting client:
If you have suggestions for future issues either because you know of a great resource or it’s something you’d like to know more about, please reach out to me. I want to make these snippets as valuable for you as possible.
Until the next one…wishing you abundant blessings!
Speak On!!!
Anastasia