The 2021 Growth Strategy: Use Domain Names To Scale Without Investing Capital

Failure happens. It’s part of the technology landscape. In fact, Forbes estimates that nine out of ten tech startups fail.

But there’s more than one way to fail. There’s the total collapse — the startup built on a concept that never gained any traction, so the founders close up shop and head for the exits.

Then there are the good failures: the quick, systematic failures inherent in any venture that’s always innovating, testing, and course correcting. These are the failures that lead to discoveries, refined concepts, and lessons learned. They pave the way to ultimate success.

How Can You Pivot And Grow On A Shoestring Budget?

Here are three free and easy-to-use domain features that can help you pivot quickly from one iteration to the next without breaking the bank.

Set up new redirects to an old site

Create a URL that reflects your latest offering and conveys a relevant message, and then use a 301 redirect to automatically forward traffic from that URL to your established website.

Make each new initiative, campaign, or offering more attractive with a memorable and descriptive domain name redirected to a specific page on your established website. Using one of the newer top-level domains (TLDs) like .live, .world, or .solutions you can create a URL that’s ultra specific to build awareness and add credibility to your new offering at an affordable price point, and then redirect that URL to a page on your current site.

Major brands are finding smart ways to drive more organic search traffic to specific parts of their website using branded short links for 301 redirects. This passes the SEO ranking power to the redirected page.

The Argentine IT consultancy Practia also created aptly-named redirects for SEO. While their main URL is practia.global, they use practia.solutions to showcase customer solutions, practia.tech to spotlight the technologies they use, practia.management to tout their project management prowess, and practia.careers to help them attract the best candidates in the industry.

As your business evolves, it’s easy to add or remove redirects and do minimal updates to the content on your current site.

Create subdomains for all

Subdomains are kind of like URL forwarding times infinity. With URL forwarding, you’re able to redirect one domain. With subdomains, you can create an endless number of custom domains that convey the same branding but have different destinations.

Let’s say your domain is www.yourbusiness.life. Perhaps you have an About page for your lead sales guy, Bob. You can send people directly to him with the subdomain bob.yourbusiness.life. And Janet, who handles shipping and customer service, can have her own page at janet.yourbusiness.life.

This subdomain superpower comes free with every domain, and is as simple as changing the “www” part of your web address into whatever alphanumeric name you want. Subdomains can be changed or deleted quickly when your next great idea strikes.

Give your email address a better look

Break away from email addresses that are typically used for personal accounts like gmail.com, hotmail.com, or yahoo.com and boost your business credibility with an email address that ends in your domain name.

Email forwarding is free with any TrueName domain, allowing you to create an infinite number of addresses that you can forward to your private account. To brand your replies and other outbound emails, simply create an email alias in your free webmail settings.

In the example above, you could create help@ITsetup.solutions, info@ITsetup.solutions, and schedule@ITsetup.solutions, and forward all three to the current email address(es) of the correct people on your team.

Vitamin ‘F’ makes you stronger

It’s understood that in order to succeed, businesses need to be willing to fall back and regroup, and learning from those failures is the key to acheiving your goals. Domain names make getting started on that path not only possible, but affordable. Most TrueName domains sell for less than $20, and all of them come with the tools you need to be successful.

So take the leap, take a chance, or take the plunge. Take whatever cliche you like, just get out there and fail. It’s the quickest way to make your dream come true.