Do you do affiliate marketing? Or maybe host a regular teleseminar for your market?
Or perhaps you have a site that reviews products or makes regular recommendations to your subscribers?
These are just a few of the reasons you might want to consider forwarding and masking a domain name.
Sure, you can accomplish these same results by creating a redirect for your domain name, but you can do this quickly and easily from your Domain Registrar (we use GoDaddy).
What Does it Mean to Forward and Mask a URL?
When you forward a domain name, your visitor types in a website URL and is taken to a different website that actually has a totally different domain name.
If you just forward the domain name, once your visitors arrive at the new site your URL sent them to, they will see the ‘real’ domain name of the new site in their browser bar.
If you want your visitors to continue to see your forwarded domain name in their browser bar after they arrive at the new site, then you also need to mask that URL.
Let’s use an example to make this easier to understand. We host a weekly free teleseminar for everyone who is on our BusinessBuildingShortcuts list. The service we use for our teleseminars creates a unique webpage for each weekly call, with its own unique URL.
When someone opts in to our list, we want them to know how they can listen to each weekly call — to know which webpage they need to go to each week.
We have a couple of options for informing them how to find the correct teleseminar webpage:
- We can send them the new URL for the call-in page every week. But sometimes emails don’t get delivered, or people get lots of email and can’t easily find the email from us that gave the required URL, so they might end up frustrated trying to find the call.
- We can buy a domain name just for this purpose and then forward it to the appropriate teleseminar call-in page, changing our special URL each week so that when people click on that link, they are always taken to this week’s call. They only have to remember that one domain name (URL) so it’s easy and convenient.
If we also mask that new domain name we bought that we forward for each call, then when people click that link and go to the teleseminar page, instead of their browser bar showing the teleseminar’s unique URL (often a long one, with a bunch of numbers – and not really very informative), it will continue to show our special domain name. That way listeners can glance up at their browser bar and see the domain name they will return to next week. And they’ll know they are in the right place.
As an aside, if you aren’t yet on our list and therefore don’t get your special invitations to our weekly call, just register using the opt-in box in the upper right corner of our blog. You’ll also get other useful business-building information when you become a part of our community.
Anyway, if you have a domain name you’d like to forward and mask, here’s a short video showing how to do it. Enjoy!
Deb & Mynders
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