Why an athlete should care about their domain name and personal brand.

As long as domain names have been around, professional athlete domain names have been valued property by domain speculators (domainers), cyber squatters, and sports fans.  If you do a whois search for most professional athletes, no matter what the sport, chances are that the domain is registered.  Even college athletes who have a shot at the professional level as well as high school recruits who haven’t committed to a school are having their domain names registered.

In a future post, I will dive deeper into the domain name speculator market, why names are registered, how to inquire about buying or recovering a domain, etc.  But in today’s post, I want to go over the reasons why you should own your own domain, and why an athlete should place a high value on owning their own domain.

Before the internet, branding an athlete was only done via commercials, magazine ads, and radio spots.  But with the age of the web and social media, from sports fans to teammates, family and friends, and advertisers and sponsors, anyone can type in a player’s name, do a search, and pull up everything they want to know about an athlete.  So here’s my question to you: Would you rather send visitors to your Wikipedia profile or to your very own custom designed and personally branded website?

For the athletes who do have a website, depending on how recently the site was launched and how your site was designed/developed, the official site should rank #1 no matter what search engine is used (a newer site does take a little while to climb the ranks above player profile pages).  But for those who do not have a site, fans have to go elsewhere to the likes of Wikipedia, league profile pages, team profile pages, Yahoo.com, CBSSports.com, etc., ultimately diverting traffic to other virtual real estate.

In my experience helping athletes build their brand online, here are 5 reasons why an athlete should own their own domain:

1. Creates a consistent place for visitors to learn more about you on and off the field.
2. Allows potential visitors using type-in-traffic of a domain name find your official website immediately.
3. Gives the ability to promote your favorite charity or your own charitable foundation year-round.
4. Protects your brand from cyber squatters, irate fans or fans that have an agenda.
5. Allows for marketing off the field for opportunities after a playing career is over.

There are more reasons that just these five for owning your own domain name to build your personal brand.  Feel free to discuss this in the comments section below and via Twitter.

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Image by pietobis

About Tim Evans

Tim Evans is the CEO of Athlete Web Design, a web design and internet marketing firm for athletes and sports professionals based in Chicago. Tim has been online since 1997 and is an expert in the domain name sales, acquisitions, and monetizing realm. This expertise in domain names has evolved into helping athletes and sports professionals with a virtual presence online through official websites for athletes / sports entities. Twitter: @athlete E-mail: tim@athletewebdesign.com

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