Acquiring a domain name is an important first step in building a successful online business. Below are the most popular reasons why individuals and businesses own domain names.

1. Improve Your Marketing and Visibility
The right domain name allows customers an easy way to remember and find you. It's your location on the web. It's also your email address.

2. Build Credibility

3. Protect Your Brand
Purchase the domain name that best represents your business name. Domains are valuable online real estate. Secure the right name and keep it out of the hands of your competitors.
You may also find many attractive domains for your business. Securing more than one helps protect your brand and increase your reach. You can easily direct as many domains as you want to a single website.

4. Acquire More Traffic
Some domains already receive traffic. This traffic principally comes from direct type-in or referral traffic. Direct type-in is when an internet user types the domain directly into her browser, such as typing 'www.photography.com.' Referral traffic typically comes from links on other websites.

5. As an Investment
Similar to real estate, domain names are investments. Domain values increase daily. You yourself can make your domain name more valuable by building and marketing your website.

Naming your site after your domain may seem obvious to some of you, but you'll be surprised to learn that not every website is named after the domain name even when the webmaster owns that domain name.

Naming a site after its domain name is important, for the simple reason that when people think of your website, they'll think of it by name. If your name is also your URL, they'll automatically know where to go. For example, when people think of thefreecountry.com, they don't have to wonder what URL to type into their browser to get there. The name of the site is also the URL.

Imagine if your business (or website) is called "Acme", but somebody else holds that domain name. Instead, you have some obscure domain name called, say, "mybusiness.com". What happens when your customers, recalling that Acme has a product they want, type "www.acme.com"? They'll wind up at your competitor's website. One lost sale.

In the modern world of the Internet, where people automatically turn to the Web for information, it pays to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. There are just fewer things for your customers or visitors to remember. Moreover, you don't seriously think that they'll try to memorise an unrelated URL just because you want them to, do you? The only people who'll memorise it are you and your competitors who want to compare your prices.