Is your company name easily misspelled?  Is your business known by a nickname locally?  Does your business name have multiple words?  Do you have trademarked products or services?

If you’ve answered any of those questions with “yes”, then you should consider buying additional domain names to protect and support your online brand.

OK - back up the bus.  That last statement is filled with web and marketing buzzwords and I don’t want you to check out on me here. 

So here’s what I mean - I assume that you want as many people as possible to find your business site on the web. I assume that this is a more important goal than making sure people know exactly how your business name is spelled, or knowing when your web address is different than your whole business name.

Yet this is exactly what happens when companies have business names that are easily missspelled.  I was recently trying to find the site for a business that had the word “liaisons” in their name, and had to back up and re-type the address 3 times before getting it right.  Not every web user will be that persistent.

The solution?  Register both the “proper” domain for your business (http://www.yourbusiness.com) and the missspelled version (http://www.yourbusness.com), and then have the misspelled version “redirected” to load the correct domain when a web user fat-fingers your business name.  Your web host or web developer should know how to implement the misspelled domain to redirect to the correct one. 

There - for roughly $15/year you just gained traffic to your business site.

Have multiple words in your business name?  Look for and register the domains for any possible combination.  I learned this one early on—having long owned and promoted “www.boyink.com”, I once sat down to use a clients computer and noted that they had typed “www.boyinkinteractive.com” into their browser.  I registered and redirected that URL the very same day.

The same rule applies to business nicknames, or any trademarks you own.  Buying any related and available domains is a cheap way to ensure that people find you on the web when using these names. 

“Deep-mapping” product-related domains into your site works nicely for product-related domains - so if a web user enters the product name as a domain name (http://www.yourgreatproductname.com) they go straight to your product page (http://www.yourbusinessname.com/yourgreatproductname)

The hard part is knowing where to draw the line when looking at additional domains.  The number of top-level domain extensions (.com, .org, .net etc) continues to grow, making domain administration a bigger task for businesses.

For companies selling in the US only, I recommend buying only .com, .org, and .net domains as these are the most likely to be guessed by web users.  If your company is international or planning to be international then I’d also recommend checking into the regional-specific domains such as .ca (for Canada) or .nl (for the Netherlands).

While you can use services like http://www.whois.net/ to research and find domains that are important to your business and available, I’d suggest doing the actual registration with your current web provider.  While you might be able to find a better deal, having all the bills and notifications for your domains coming through one source will be an easier (and in the end, cheaper) way to administrate multiple domains.