Buying Your Own Domain Name -- Follow Up

I put up a post here back in February titled:Buying Your Own Domain Name. This is an update to that post.

I wrote:

Are you using your company's replicating website to promote your business? You know...the kind that has one of those easy-to-remember addresses like mysuperjuice.com/drinkhealthy.

Think someone is going to remember that? What if you change businesses in 6 months? You handed out 500 business cards with mysuperjuice.com/drinkhealth on them, but now you're promoting a new opportunity, and 500 potential customers can't reach you since the company immediately shut down your affiliate site as soon as you quit.

So the point of my post was that: It just makes good business sense to spend a few dollars per year to create and register your own domain. The benefits are pretty obvious:

*Self-branding

*Easy for your customers and prospects to find you - including those prospects who are intent on contacting you but haven't had a chance yet - maybe they were just referred by a friend, found one of your fliers or business cards, or saved your affiliate domain in their favorites so they could call you this coming weekend when they're at home.

*Portability and great versatility if you change companies, if your company changes domain names, if they go out of business (you'll lose your affiliate site and domain in all these instances, and your customers/prospects will be left hanging in the wind unless they already know your personal, non-business e-mail address or have your cell phone # already programmed into their speed-dial list) etc. etc.

Back to my story...it was brought to my attention by the compliance officer up at headquarters that it is absolutely against policy to utilize your own domain or non-replicating site for promoting the business - you can't even simply use your own domain as a forwarding domain to send traffic to their company (even without domain masking): "Unless you've reached a higher rank in the chain" than I have so far. That's right, a guy or gal making more money than me can go out and spend $8.00 on their own personal domain, log into the domain hosting control center and forward said domain to the replicating website, but I can't! I have (had) a good search-engine ranking for my own domain (from working my posterior off), and since I'm outranking one of their "golden boy sellers" who ranks higher in the sales volume than I do, they're not going to stand for it! By golly, they've got to keep their golden boys happy so they keep raking money in for the "powers that be." For those of us ladder-jumpers who have been more successful in promoting our online presence than some of their top sellers, we are getting the ladder knocked out from under us to leave more room at the top for their existing "Diamond-level Sellers" who are already at the top of the ladder. That's like telling me, "You can't use all the steps of the ladder to get to the top of it. Only those who are already at the top can use all ladder steps." Duh.

I mean that's as ludicrous a rule as saying one guy with a McDonald's franchise can use coupons to drive business to his store, but the guy on the other side of town can't. Only the higher-profit-level guy is allowed to use coupons to bring people to his store. The other poor guy wants to use coupons so he CAN BRING MORE CUSTOMERS TO HIS STORE TO INCREASE HIS PROFITS. It seems like the mother-company is shooting themselves indirectly in their own foot- actually - it doesn't SEEM like it...they really are. They are limiting possible sources of profit ultimately for themselves.

Keep in mind, in this post, I'm not talking about a domain name that infringes on the company's trade name or intellectual property rights. I'm saying, for example, that Bill Smith would not be allowed to use his BillSmith.com domain in any way in conjunction with his affiliate business.

Oh well, I guess they didn't want my high-volume, hard-earned traffic, so I forwarded the domain to this blog for now. I can always use more visitors here. I guess if I keep working hard and achieve in affiliate rank at that company, I will get a letter says something like:

Dear Joe,

Congratulations - your hard work has paid off. Here is your $100,000 bonus and you may now forward your little $8.00 personal domain to your replicating website. By the way, as you may have read, our website has changed, be sure you forward it to the new domain.