You wake up, first thing in the morning and groggily make a cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal.
As you sit down in front of your computer, you sip away on your coffee and begin your normal routine of checking all your websites. Your first one comes up fine.
The second one…
has no problems besides a few typographical errors you didn’t notice before. The third one, however, has edits you never made. In fact, it’s a totally different site.
You check your email and notice a new message from Sven, who lives in Sweden. He politely tells you that he’s snatched up your URL and if you want it back, you can have it back…for $100,000.
If you’ve ever lost a URL due to an overlooked expiration date or even come close to it, you know the frustration in losing something so valuable.
To avoid losing any of your URLs organize follow the following steps.
1. If you don’t already have a URL Expiration Doc, create one. A word document will work just fine, but setting it up as an Excel chart makes for easy sorting.
2. Sort the document by expiration date – from most immediate to most distant.
3. Login or call your domain manager to renew all of the URLs that expire that year. And renew them for 5 years, just to be on the safe side.
4. If, for whatever reason, you can’t renew them all at once, set a reminder in your calendar one month before each impending expiration date. Make sure to put all the necessary information in your calendar details so you have everything you need right there.
Once you’ve taken these steps to ensure your websites stay in your possession, you’ll only need to do this once a year, so you can focus your energy on improving your sites and keeping them out of the hands of others.
