You have purchased a domain name or maybe at the stage of considering purchasing a domain name. You also start asking what is the use of domain name. The obvious answer that people always associated domain name is to have a website? While it is true, but it is not the only reason to have a domain name.
If you been following us either through our social media account or even this website, we have been an advocate to the idea that domain name is your brand name. True, in the connected world today, website is no longer a must. I see people selling online purely using whatsapp, facebook, instagram, etc. Instead of blogging, like what we did in the past, opinion are expressed in social media page such as facebook, twitter or even youtube. Again, you will be asking, then why I still need a domain name?
Domain name is your brand
As mentioned earlier, domain name is your address on the internet. By registering a domain name, you are registering that particular address that is uniquely yours. Domain name is searchable and can only be pointing to you.
While there is nothing wrong with using a social media, but unless you are among the first adopter, you may end up having an address like hostsite.com/yourname_withunderscore_and_with_numbers. You will be lucky if you can get an address like facebook.com/kerepekonline. And even if you manage to get the address that you want, then how do people contact you? Facebook messenger? Free email account such as gmail/ outlook/ etc. And what will your email address looks like. yourname_withunderscore_and_with_numbers@gmail.com? Again you will be lucky if this email address matches your facebook account.
I am one of the lucky enough to be invited to use gmail. And that is in the year 2004. Hence the reason my email address is asruls@gmail.com which is the same like my hotmail account, asruls@hotmail.com, which is the same as my facebook page. Am I lucky? No, I adopt internet long before there is a nationwide internet in Malaysia.
Hence, as someone serious enough to built your internet presence, having a domain name is the only option. Even that proof to be hard today if you want to own a .COM domain, which is one of the more popular domain name. Check our articles on Popular Domain 
. But today, you will see, more and more domain extensions has gain traction. .XYZ for example, has gain popularity that I predict will be equal with .COM one day.
How Can a Domain Name Helps be Your Brand
With a registered domain name (say mybrand.biz), you can have:
- a website (you already know that).
- an email address that will end with your domain. To create an email address such as asruls@mybrand.biz, asrul.sani@mybrand.biz or anything that I want.
- forward all my socials media account to my domain name. So I can have:
- fb.mybrand.biz to be redirected to my facebook account.
- ig.mybrand.biz to be redirected to my Instagram account.
- tweet.mybrand.biz to be redirected to my Tweeter page.
- youtube.mybrand.biz to be redirected to my Youtube page.
- forward all my social chat to my domain name. So I can have:
- wasap.mybrand.biz to be redirected to my Whats App Account.
- telegram.mybrand.biz to be redirected to my Telegram Account
and many more. Notice in all the above, people just have to remember mybrand.biz. With the domain name, you can have unlimited subdomain. Read this articles to understand what is subdomain .
You do not need to have all in order to have a domain name. Start small, maybe just facebook and Instagram, then scale up later whenever you are ready to have a website.
You have Absolute Control on your Domain Name
By using free services or even social media, you are subjected to their terms and conditions which may change or differ in the future. While we are not soliciting the usage of internet for unlawful or unethical matters, views can be different. And when you are using those platform, they have the right to remove your content if it is found to be not align to their terms of use. How many incident has we see facebook and youtube delete users content which they deemed to be inappropriate. And that is done using whose benchmark and guideline?
Conclusion
There is never a perfect time to register a domain name. Even if you are 18 years old, 40 years old or 60 years old. If you would like to mark your area in this big world wide web that we called internet, there is no other way to do it other than registering/ claim your domain name today.
