One of the most surprising mistakes that I see web site owners and sometimes even experienced web masters make is not checking domain name availability and grabbing their brand real estate when they have the chance.  What I am talking about are not only top level domain names (f.e. problogger.com and problogger.net etc.), but free sub domain names as well.

Whether you are starting a blog, web site or any web project for that matter, the first thing that you should do before registering your domain name check for availability across sites that offer free sub domains.  Some of these are blogger.com (yourdomainname.blogspot.com), wordpress.com (yourdomainname.wordpress.com) and StumbleUpon.com (yourdomainname.stumbleupon.com) amongst others.

If you don’t do this, you can end up loosing a piece of your brand real estate. Imagine how you would feel if you are the web master of new company web site or blog and you find out that after your registered a great domain name, most sub domains across free sites have been taken already ?

In the worst case, you’ll have to buy a domain name from the parents of a 12 year old who has been playing with the GoDaddy domain name search and used his Mommy’s credit card to register your brand name.

Now, the example above is just that, a colorful example, but it’s very possible. I have seen many annoying situations regarding domain names during my time as a freelancer.  Most of the headache is avoidable, this is an extremely simple tip.

Where do You Grab Brand Real Estate ?

I’ve only mentioned 3 examples where brand real estate can be grabbed.  Of course there are more.  The point of this blog entry is to build a comprehensive list together. So, where do you go in order to grab your online brand real estate ?

Putting the role that blogging nowadays plays into perspective, from my viewpoint, one of the interesting things is how blogs have evolved into multipurpose communication and marketing tools.  Blogs are not only used as a chronologically categorized publishing of information anymore,  but they’ve also become effective  marketing and branding extensions for relevant third-parties.

These third parties can for instance be businesses with commercial intentions who are deliberately seeking quality blogs with intend to establish a marketing or advertising partnership.  Needless to say, with the huge number of blogs around, it’s very likely these third parties will find bloggers who are willing to place advertising banners and / or affiliate links on their pages in return for income or commission.

Thus the blog effectively becomes an ‘extension‘, fulfilling a specific function for a certain third party.

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Now, I don’t like to repeat myself too often, but here we go. If you read my tutorial on how to Build an Optimal Keyword Attack Formula, then you will have come across a section about ‘Smart Content Writing‘.

In this post I’d like to talk about how my previous post (SEO - Injecting new Keywords and Phrases) fits exactly into that context. Sometimes things are not exactly what they seem (in a positive way). This context is what I call : ’smart / creative content writing’.

It’s a concept that is good to take into account whenever you plan to write effectively for the web, be it as a blogger or as an internet marketer.  The reason that I’d like to share it is because I found it to be rather effective.

If you look closely at the tactics that successful bloggers are using, you may find that if they aren’t doing it consciously they are still doing something similar unconsciously.

To come to the point : There were several underlying reasons that I wrote the injecting new keywords and phrases post:

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