JohnSmithPersonalTraining.com may seem like a good idea as the domain name of your local personal training business, certainly when you get started, but from my perspective it is bad business practice. Certainly if you have pretentions to sell your business in future, John Smith Personal Training is just not the same without John Smith right?
And if you’ve invested years building up the search rankings for that domain, then all that is worth nought when you come to sell.
One of the best moves I made right at the start of my Personal Training business is I called it GetFit.lu, rather than Tim Goodwin PT. This was purely accidental I must add, but when it came to selling the business I could sell the name and the website and all its search engine ranking and have it as a valuable asset I could add to the sale of the business.
Domains with geographic identifiers are certainly worth more, because of the ease of getting it ranked on to google’s first page. For example personaltrainerluxembourg.com was certainly very easy to rank for the search term “Personal Trainer Luxembourg”.
Should We Own YourName.com Domain?
Anyway, back to the original thought… should we actually buy vanity domains? For example is there any value in buying YourName.com?
From a search engine perspective I don’t believe there is much value, especially if you have a fairly common name or you share a name with someone famous. For example, there is a film director by the name of Tim Goodwin, who owns the domain of the same name, which is kinda irritating, and it means most search results for my name show this Director dude and not me!
I’ve owned for years now the domain timgoodwin.eu the .info and the .net just to take ownership of as much personal real estate as I could. But the other day I had a real “doh” homer simpson moment… why not include my middle initial, which is what I do for most of my social media accounts anyway!
So I bought the timdgoodwin.com domain.
What am I going to use it for?
Well to be honest I don’t know! 
Most likely I’ll build a simple website which links to all stuff Tim Goodwin. So Tim Goodwin the Fitness Professional, Tim Goodwin the Entrepreneur, The Mountain Biker, the speaker, the SEO consultant.
It means if I go to a seminar like the event I was at at the weekend(not a fitness industry event), I at least have somewhere to send people to!
As the world (online at the very least) becomes more of an exercise in Personal Branding, then planet YOU needs to have a home.
Go check out to see if YourName.com is still available… If the simple form of your name is not then don’t forget about middle initials, or even adding “Iam” or “Meet” to the front of your name, eg. IamPaulMort.com or MeetJoeBlack.com
In the comments section below tell me if you own your own name domain name, and make sure you add it as a link.
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