Be Careful What Your Email Says About You
Recently I read this fantastic article about email addresses by Cindy Westfall. This important topic is instrumental for business folks to take us seriously and I had to help spread the word.
Luckily, one of my GRI instructors talked about this almost 10 years ago. She said that as a business professional, it is hard to be taken seriously when your email address is somethingsilly@aol.com (or as she called it "Amateurs On-Line").
I just wanted to piggy-back off of this terrific article to share that it is possible to obtain a web domain name and virtually unlimited email addresses for as little as $10 per year.
When I was starting my business, I reserved a .com domain name for $10 per year through 1and1.com. It came with ONE email address. I couldn't decide what to use!
Fortunately, the default email address is *.yourdomain.com. The (*) is a "wild card" and can mean anything. This way, on your busienss cards and marketing materials, you can use
firstname.lastname@yourdomain.com
homes@yourdomain.com, etc etc...whatever you want. It's limitless!
They will all go to the same place: your inbox for *@yourdomain.com. And most, if not all, web hosting companies allow access to your email accounts online and/or the ability to set it up with an email client, like Microsoft Outlook.
What is fantastic about this is even though the actual email address is *@yourdomain.com, when an email comes in for eric@yourdomain.com, your reply email will say that it's from eric@yourdomain.com! No one will even know.
So go register a domain (1and1.com typically has .com domain specials for as little as $1.00 per year for the first year) in your name or something that you can use and set this up.
And for goodness sakes, ditch that AOL account for business purposes.
Image courtesy of ddpavumba/freedigitalphotos.net
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