Ever since businesses started to get a website in the 1990s, .com has been the most popular domain extension. It is the most easily recognizable domain extension, even to the point of people assuming that your official website is always a .com. Thanks to ICANN’s decision to allow generic top-level domains (gTLDs), specific and meaningful extensions such as .attorney, .club, or .environment are growing popular. You might wonder why you would ever need a second or third official website when you already have a .com or a .net website that does everything. In this article, we explain to you why you probably should get a .club website on top of your regular website. Before that, let us understand what a club extension is all about.
ICANN allowed .club and other gTLDs recently to meet the growing demands of businesses and individuals, especially when .coms and .orgs are saturated with meaningful names. By choosing a generic top-level domain, businesses now have the opportunity to possess a website whose website is not made up of nonsensical words or numbers. In fact, a .club extension can prove to be useful in many more ways, even if you already have a regular website.
1. Support Facebook and LinkedIn groups
Most businesses today have their Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and their social media teams take utmost care to engage and share content on these groups. The only problem is, your social media team probably has even more important things to do than just manage social groups on social networking sites. In order to reduce their burden, and to make sure that your social groups have an identity of their own, why not get the second website with a .club extension? A number of companies, consultants and even individuals are doing just that. The .club domain helps your social media team to support Facebook and LinkedIn groups with more targeted and niche content that you probably don’t want to share on generic social media websites.
2. Eliminate Social Media groups altogether
Sometimes, we neither have the manpower nor the resources to manage multiple social groups, pages, and accounts. We can really focus just on Twitter, or engage only on Facebook. Or probably, we just use LinkedIn through our personal or company accounts. To manage and handle additional social groups to imply our own thought leadership can prove to be a cumbersome activity. In such a case, your .club domain can replace your social groups, and all your social accounts can direct traffic to your .club website for more personal interaction and communication. An example would be, a company using its Twitter handle for all social queries, and directing traffic to its .club domain for detailed blogs, opinion pieces, fan forums, community building, etc.
3. Better control over your brand identity
It is a well-known fact that most companies today use a .com or a .net website. Whoever uses other kinds of domain extensions will force extra cognitive activity on users and audience, which means, lost traffic. On top of this, if your company name does not match your social pages or groups, you will risk brand uniformity, which will ultimately hurt your brand identity. By getting a .club website in your own brand’s or company’s name, you will have a better control over your brand identity. Additionally, instead of building and nurturing your audience on social groups hosted on Facebook or LinkedIn, why not do the same thing on your own adjunct social website?
4. Promote thought leadership
Let us face it. Everyone does not use Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Different audiences prefer different social networks. How would you handle the large percentage of people who only use Twitter? Of what use would be your Facebook or LinkedIn group for them? To deal with such and many other scenarios, it helps to build your thought leadership on an easily recognizable platform, such as an online club that belongs to you. Build that club on a .club website. Promoting your own thought leadership never was this easy!
5. Reduce social media activity
As discussed previously, companies today face the risk of over-exposure on social media. It is also time and resource-consuming, something that social media teams can use more effectively. Such time can be used to create better content, more in-depth campaigns, and engage with the audience in smarter ways. Restricting a large portion of your social activity on a secondary .club website will help you to reduce social media activity, which in turn helps you to engage authentically on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, instead of worrying about keeping the accounts active.
6. Cash in on the cool factor
If you haven’t heard already, 50 Cent, and other celebrities have begun to use .club domains to nurture their fans and audiences. In other words, .club has a cool factor attached to it, and when it comes to marketing, you can’t afford to miss out on anything that as perceived as cool, young, and happening. Moreover, a “club” also connotes exclusivity, luxury, opulence, and such other positive meanings. It makes sense to have a secondary website that focuses on social interactions on a .club extension so that you can exploit its cool factor.
7. As an adjunct to your regular website
You might think, you have an official website, a couple of social pages, and a Twitter account, all working in place. And you might wonder what the need is to have a secondary website with a .club extension. It is important to have an adjunct website that is more casual and exclusive in nature. Use the .club website to nurture your most treasured clients and customers, share deals and discounts with them, exclusive content with them, or help them to interact with each other on the club website. Possibilities are endless. You cannot possibly create exclusiveness by creating a subdomain. Having a secondary or adjunct website for your most treasured or exclusive audience helps them to value you as a brand even more.
Do not postpone registering a .club domain
As with most generic TLDs, .club is increasingly bought over and reserved by companies even when they are not actively using them. To avoid the situation where you will not be able to find your desired domain name along with .club, make haste, and register for a .club domain now. If you delay, you might miss out on an opportunity to create an exclusive online club space for your audience.
