Work, life and things in between – Day 94 – One of a kind!
I was awake at 3.15 a.m. What the heck! might as well get up and make coffee. I got ahead in my homework. I even had time to go on line and create my business e-mail address. I had not planned on doing this at this point but since I had extra time on my hands, I did.
Of course, to create an e-mail address you need a business name and it needs to be unique. The two go hand in hand. Of course, the name needs to be unique. Because I did not know what business I wanted to be in specifically or when or where I would launch the said business, specifically, and because you have to start somewhere, I decided I would call my business by my name. Who else would use it?
As soon as you have decided to put your business on line, you realize that when it comes to giving it a name nowadays, every word in the dictionary has been used . You can only come near to selecting what you want for a name by using words combination. So I simply created a new Gmail account with my full name and Coaching attached to it. This way I figured, whatever my niche market is, I am covered. Then, when I tried to link my business address to my LinkedIn account, it told me this was not a real business.
The nerve! What do you mean not a real business?
Turned out, a name is nothing without a domain. As you create your business you need a domain . That is if you want to be on line. But nowadays it all goes without saying. Not many businesses can survive without being on line…even funeral homes are going social and they have as captive a market as it gets! So, there you go!
You need a domain of your own if you want your business to be treated as such. Think of it as a street address. It is the cyberspace equivalent of bricks and mortar in the days of the local general store. If you try to create your business using Yahoo or Gmail domains, then a lot of the applications will not recognize you as a business. It is the same as if you located your office in the basement of the CN tower. No one would find you there and all your mail would go to the CN tower mail room…sort of!
The things we don’t know!
So do you know how to get a domain? The domains I know have lakes and hills on them and will for ever be out of my price range, So I went about finding out how people get domains because I must confess, I did not have a clue. So easy! Actually, you don’t buy a domain, you rent it. Not sure who “the guy” behind the counter is though. Have you ever stopped to think who owns .com or .ca? I know to some people this is a no brainer but to me it is total abstraction…..but in any case, thanks to my strategy of using my own name, I was able to lock in my domain and e-mail address.
I felt pretty good about that.
When you embark on the journey of creating your own business, there is a myriad of such small events. Hours of research, frustrations, confusion, trials and tribulations and in those times, you so desperately wish you were back in your Corporate world where a whole internal infrastructure dealt with this on a daily basis in such a way that you did not even know all these things existed. Dealing with this makes you feel incompetent, ignorant and totally inefficient and the worst part is they have nothing to do with your business and what you are good at other than the fact that they are the backbone to it all.
Pretty hard to ignore.
I am immensely grateful, everytime, to anyone who is understanding enough to take the time to help when it comes to dealing with this. In fact, it is a great lesson for my own practice: Having to deal with elements that are out of your element is difficult.
Remember that. To day 95.