Recently GoDaddy hosted a well-attended Hangout about the ins and outs of buying expired domains on GoDaddy’s auction platform.

I registered but didn’t get to attend due to celebrating a friend’s birthday with breakfast. And it was a GOOD breakfast too.

But fortunately for me and now you, GoDaddy recorded the hangout.

Is it pivotal for your business to own a .com domain? That’s the question of the hour today.

Today’s title plays on a massive $254 million Series C investment with a whopping $2.8 billion valuation recently awarded to Pivotal, a software and services company that provides agile development services on an open source platform.

As reported by TechCrunch, Pivotal has swooned the wallets of Ford, Microsoft, EMC, VMware and GE for a quite a hefty investment.

As I was checking emails the other day, my eyes landed on an email from GoDaddy entitled “Action Required: Please verify your email address.”

I didn’t give the email much thought, and I’ll share with you why.

To give a bit of context, I was opening GoDaddy email notifications pertaining to domain renewals and recent services I had purchased.  

Dear KC Readers,

Today is the last day of March. This month marks the 3rd anniversary in the journey of KickstartCommerce.com.

The last 3 years have been amazing, to say the least. There have been ups and downs, big losses but even bigger wins.

My confidence as a writer has been boosted while my writing has grown leaps and bounds. I’m not perfect and there is still room for improvement.

This has been and will continue to be journey. I made some changes over the last 3 months that have drastically put the blog on a different course than when I first started.

I want to share with you and others in hopes that this story inspires each of you to maximize your potential towards achieving excellence and greatness in what you’re called to do in life.

Today, global conglomerates throughout the world are making a concerted effort to understand the value of premium .com domains as well as their impact to their respective company and industry.

Long have corporate marketing departments focused their efforts on marketing, advertising, and branding their respective companies to become leading industry titans, spending millions or billions of dollars each year doing so.

From startups to tenured companies with hundreds of years of experience in the industry and business, most derive from the school of thought in finding a word or name that has not a meaning, and injecting a meaning also known as branding.

While this has worked well for years, seeing companies like Etsy, Efty, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and others successfully thrive, businesses aiming to be the next in command of a dominating global conglomerate must differentiate itself amongst the approximately 800MM websites and counting.

Most brick and mortar businesses often do not make it to their 3rd birthday. Why?

Well, there are many reasons as to why businesses, specifically small businesses, fail and never make it past 3 years in business.

Sometimes it’s not having a market.

Sometimes it’s mismanagement.

Sometimes it’s customer service.

Sometimes it’s lack of foot traffic or a bad location.

Sometimes it’s the product or service being offering. And the list goes one.

All of the aforementioned options have a price tag deemed as the cost of doing business.

But did you know that a single asset could reduce, if not eliminate, the total cost of ownership of the aforementioned options?

This single asset I speak of can give you more options that those I listed. Yes, more options from ONE asset alone.

Okay, so it’s no secret that domain names are critical to business today and have been for the last 20 and counting years. When precisely selected, a domain name can reduce the marketing spend and sometimes eliminate it altogether.

How do I know, you ask?

I’ll start by asking a few questions, and then I’ll share a few thoughts with you.

If you knew then what you know now about your business, then would what you know change the outcome of how you operate your business?

If you could reduce, if not eliminate, marketing spend, would you do this for more customer growth and revenue?

Answering without a shadow of doubt, could the lessons learned propel your business towards generating greater customer growth and revenue?

Often times, life’s greatest lessons are seen with great clarity when looking back. We must learn to respect the past as the key to unlocking the doors to our present and, more importantly, our future.

Much can be found in the past. Sometimes we find subtleties of truth, yet other times the glaring truth of mistakes stare a hole through us.

To say the least, the concept of setting aside one’s personal agenda for a greater cause can be challenging, especially in terms of a business that took the blood, sweat, and tears of leaders and visionaries to launch and claw their way to making the impossible possible.

And the truth be told for certain businesses today, countless numbers are missing potential customers at this very moment.

Why? The short answer is due to the uninformed decision making of a well-meaning business owner.

If you were told the one thing separating your business from generating greater customer growth and revenue for your business was your digital presence, then what would you do?