Beauty Salon Marketing

If you have a salon website, or are thinking of setting up a website for your spa or salon, we highly recommend you read this article - 3 Steps To Protect Your Domain Name - at Small Business Trends. For many salon owners, their salon website is becoming their main marketing tool for attracting new customers. It is surprising how easily all the time and effort you have invested in your salon website can be lost, if you are not careful about how you have registered your domain name (eg. mysalon.com).

The first point in the article is the most important -

“First, make sure your domain is actually registered in your name. This sounds straight forward, but it’s trickier than it seems.

For example, when business owners hire a local web designer to create their website, that person often registers the site’s address (domain name) as part of their services. The problem arises when this designer registers the domain in their own name. The same thing sometimes occurs with company employees - they will register the domain in their own personal name. The individual who registers that domain name has the right to that domain”

There are also some good points in the comments below the main article. In addition, we would add a couple of important factors -

1. Think carefully about which email address you use, when you register your domain. When the domain expires, in a year or two, the reminder to renew it will be sent by email. So make sure that the email address you are using is one that you will still have access to, and be checking regularly, in a couple of years time. And if you ever stop using that email address, make sure you go to the website where you registered your domain, and update your details to your new email address BEFORE the old email address expires.
2. Many website-hosting companies offer a free domain when you join them. Do not use this to register the main domain for your salon website (or if you do, ask them if you can transfer the domain name to an independent registrar, like Register.com or GoDaddy). If you want to move your website to a different hosting company in the future, it may be difficult or time-consuming to get your domain name back from the original hosting company. And if there are any disputes, the hosting company can effectively “hold you to ransom” by holding on to your domain name.

The article’s author, Wendy Kennedy, is the creator and editor of Register.com’s Learning Center (an online resource site for small businesses) which has several useful articles, if you want to learn more.