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    Categories: Content MarketingDigital StrategyOnline MarketingSearch Marketing

What Google’s New .How Top Level Domain Means for Marketers

Today, Google made available the purchase of .how domain names available to the general public. This is huge for digital marketers and coaches around the world.

Google's aim with this new Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) is to make it easier for businesses and individuals to share content & teach people how to do something. With the online education industry projected to grow well into the $100's of Billions in the next few years, the new .How domain extension provides an incredible opportunity to those looking to showcase their knowledge.

If you're ready to pick up your .How Domain, head over to Get.How (by Google) and get started now.

 

As a marketer, you're at the front lines of discovering new customers, educating them about your products or services, and showing them how you can help achieve their goals. There are many ways this new TLD can positively impact your business.

There are already a number of businesses and individuals that are using .how domains, to showcase their skills and offer eLearning opportunities to people around the world. If you want to learn how to skydive, how to be a better cook, or how to win in a sword fight, then you're in luck. With a .how domain extension, these businesses are poised to experience some major SEO benefits for search terms around "how to ..." when it comes to their specific niches.

Related Class: The Marketer's Secret to Content Marketing Success

Let's say you're in the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry and your product is a CRM tool that helps businesses track their customers actions and qualifies them as sales leads when they complete certain steps within your selling process. You're likely spending a lot of time educating your sales leads (and customers) on how your product is going to provide value and help them close more deals.

We know that content marketing is rapidly becoming one of the best ways to reach and engage new customers. From the example above, in order to help educate your customers and attract new sales leads, you could create a new website on a .how domain that's designed around the concept of giving out free (unbiased) advice for business owners on how to grow their sales funnels.

Launching a new platform that features genuinely beneficial educational videos, regular blog content, downloadable free resources, and offers a way to get in touch with your business for personalized advice, is a great strategy for building trust and a powerful reputation within your industry. If you're looked to as an authority on how to convert leads into customers, and you're a source of meaningful content for businesses looking to do exactly that, then you're really going to solidify your position in the marketplace.

As Google's CIO, Ben Fried put it, "embracing .how is a great opportunity for companies and individuals to improve how they reach and engage thinkers and people who want to learn."

Whether you take advantage of Google's new .how domain extensions or not, you can't afford to miss out on the opportunities that are created when you become an online authority on a topic deeply connected to your business. If you're looking for some tips on how to kick off your content marketing strategy, check out our awesome class on Executing a Winning Content Marketing Program.