FPO:

With much of the country shut down due to COVID-19, many U.S. companies are facing difficult questions when scheduling their annual shareholder meetings, including whether to delay or move such meetings or hold them virtually. In response to the uncertainty COVID-19 has injected during the busiest time for annual meetings, the Securities and Exchange Commission Staff recently published guidance to assist public companies with their upcoming shareholder meetings, providing regulatory flexibility to companies seeking to change the date and location of the meetings, or proposing to use new technologies, such as virtual shareholder meetings that avoid the need for in-person shareholder attendance, while at the same time ensuring that shareholders and other market participants remain sufficiently informed.

Doug Shuman, Senior Vice President of Customer Marketing at Register.com, offers a few tips at the Small Business Advice Blog on picking a domain name in times of increasing scarcity. With my added commentary, here you go:

Get geographic specific. Add specific geography descriptions to your preferred domain name. PeoriaDivorceLawBlog.com, as opposed to IllinoisDivorceLawBlog.com. Most of your divorce work is being done locally anyway. Show people in your town you’re there for them.

Get brand name specific. Add your law firm name to your preferred domain name. SmithJonesEnvironmnentalLaw.com. Medium and larger law firms already have a regional or, in some cases, national brand. Adding your law firm’s name only strengthens the name of your blog. The blog gains credibility being driven by your law firm, as opposed to a lesser known law firm publishing a generic ‘environmentallawblog.com.’ Adding your firm name also spikes enthusiasm for the blog among lawyers and other staff in the firm.

Buy a domain that’s already been registered. Depending on the domain name you’re after, it may be within your reach for a thousand bucks if there’s not a blog or website already running on it. Domain name speculators buy a lot of domains for next to nothing so it doesn’t take a lot for them to see a big return on their investment. For a nominal fee there are services that will act as your agent in assessing the amount to pay and acting as your broker in making an offer. Folks may try to hold you up knowing you’re a law firm (name gives it away), but it may be worth a shot.

At the end of the day, don’t lose much sleep on domain names. The majority of people coming to your blog for the first time will do so from a link on another site.

In addition, Internet users search for everything these days. They’re more likely to search travelocity on Google than to key in travelocity.com in the url address bar.

People searching for legal content or the name of local lawyer will search by what they are looking for and in the case of a lawyer, Peoria Divorce Lawyer. Properly optimized for Google and the other search engines, your blog will be at the top of the results no matter your domain name.

Content and common sense rule on law blogs. Don’t check your common sense at the door by racking your brain for hours in search of a ‘perfect domain name.’ It’s not in the top five things to focus on in launching an effective blog.