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Yes, just this week, we saw a new extension released, and it’s tailored specifically to us as insurance agents. This new TLD (Top Level Domain) is “.insurance,” which I’m sure is going to be a great tool for us moving forward. What does a TLD mean exactly? Well, traditionally speaking, we are used to seeing the “.com,” “.net,” or “.org” extensions of the world, but now more and more extensions are popping up. This means that instead of just having www.paradisoinsurance.com as the URL for my agency’s website, now we can make use of www.paradisoinsurance.insurance, or quite possibly www.paradiso.insurance instead so that it looks a bit cleaner for our customers.

Although these new domain extensions were just announced on Tuesday this week (June 14th), these TLDs aren’t live just yet. After a phone call with GoDaddy this morning, it turns out that GoDaddy hasn’t yet captured this market space, and were not sure if they even have plans to yet. The representative we spoke to told us that we’d have to look through a different company, and trust me, I let him know that wasn’t the best idea on providing an outstanding customer experience. Essentially, what the representative DID tell us is that if we did want to try to reserve the extension, we’d essentially be bidding on it, and it would be up for auction. This isn’t exactly what we wanted to hear, because when it comes to purchasing domains, usually it’s first come first serve. This means that if you so choose not to purchase all of the corresponding domains, than your competition can purchase your domain and have them redirect back to their insurance agency’s website instead. For example, at our agency, we’ve purchased paradisoinsurance.agency, paradisoins.com, and more, just to be safe. After that, we simply redirect all of our extra domains back to our original website’s URL, being www.paradisoinsurance.com.

There’s no perfect right or wrong answer quite yet to these new TLDs. After a little bit of research, we have discovered that they aren’t quite available for purchase yet, but we did find a few websites to keep an eye on in the meantime to monitor when they will be released. If you’d like to take the extra initiatives to keep an eye out for your agency’s new .insurance domain, here are a few websites we can suggest looking at:

• https://www.name.com/domains/insurance
• https://iwantmyname.com/domains/dot-insurance
• https://www.101domain.com/insurance.htm

To read more about these new extensions, you can always check out Insurance Business America’s post on the subject.