Face it, nothing looks more unprofessional than running a business with a Yahoo, AOL, GMail, or Hotmail email address. It screams out, “I am too small to run with the big guys!” Now, if that is the image you are trying to project, you are all set. But if you want to foster name recognition, and take your business to the next level, you really have to consider using your domain name as your email address. The worst part of using an AOL address, or whatever is that they often have advertisements at the bottom of your email – and sometimes the ads cause your email to get tossed into the spam folder. Not good.
You have to get a domain name in the first place. Got one? Then you are all set. Need one? Your first step is to check if it is available or not. I usually go to www.whois.com and type in the domain name and click to find out if it is available or not. It it’s available, the nice people at whois will gladly sell you domain name services. At about $10 per year, it’s a pretty good service. They will also allow you to set up your email address with your domain name and forward your mail to a hotmail or gmail account, if you want. This works pretty well, however, lately I have been using another method that takes a little bit more time to set up, but I think is worth it in the long run.
You can set up a GMail account, with all the benefits and conveniences of a web-based GMail client – and configure it such that instead of yourname@Gmail.com it is yourname@yourdomain.com. Much better. Plus you can more easily add and manage users, and the GMail client just keeps getting better. Did I mention that the service is FREE, just like a standard GMail account. Oh sure, if you need more than 7.5 GB of email storage, you can pay for a premium account, but most of us can manage to keep our email under a couple gigabytes or so.
I don’t think it is a coincidence, but if you go to www.gmail.com and try to set up an account, it is really easy to accidentally sign up for the free trial for the Premier (PAID) version. Go ahead if you want the additional benefits of the paid account, but for my needs, the free Standard account is plenty. The links change from time-to-time, but as of Feb. 2010 you can get to the free ‘Standard’ version setup by way of this link.
To get the most out of it, you need to spend a little time configuring it just right. Google provides some great step-by-step instructions, so I won’t duplicate them here – but one feature that is not immediately obvious is the ability to create an alias URL that points directly to your GMail account login. The default URL is some long and unwieldy name that you could never remember. By creating an alias, you can access your branded email by going to mail.yourdomain.com. Hard to forget that!
So, ditch that old AOL.com email address. You’re ready for the big time.
