All the cool kids do.

Which means I wasn’t cool until this weekend, I guess. Not that I am now, since I’m a little late to the game.

For the benefit of any beginners, a domain is a web address. When you first set up a blog with WordPress, its domain might be something like yourname.wordpress.com. If you want, it could be simply yourname.com.

Personal branding tool

I’d never given much thought to registering a domain until recently. Yet it’s an inexpensive personal branding tool that you might want to consider if you haven’t already done so. Especially if you’re blogging and want to promote your blog more effectively, or if you’re in the job market and want to build your personal brand. Setting up a blog is an excellent way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in your line of work, and having your name as the web address is the icing on the cake.

For less than $20 a year you can have yourname.com as your domain. You can put it on your business card, add it to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles, and include it in any other marketing tactics you can think of.

Caution

There’s one thing to be aware of if you’re already blogging on wordpress.com and you map your new domain to your blog.  If you use widgets that count the number of Facebook likes you’d received, how many times you’ve been tweeted, +1, etc., those are going to be reset to zero. I had dozens of likes and tweets on some of my posts but now the count is gone. I swear.

The neat thing is now I own ChipMcCraw.com for as long as I want it and no one else named Chip McCraw can have it. You can grab your name now too if no one else already has.