Not so long ago, I registered nickramsay.com and pointed it here. That was just one step in helping my blog reach #1 in Google when you searched for my name… although my arch-rival, Conservative politician, Nick Ramsay, has now reclaimed that spot. Well done, Nick. Best of four? 😉
Get a domain name in Japanese
In the comments on that post, acclaimed author, environmentalist, database magician and Japan blogger, Jason Irwin, alerted me to JP Domains, a website at which I could register two .jp domain names for just $40, and have them point to my blog with my name in katakana!
Get your name before you lose it
According to Dale Carnegie, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”, and he’s absolutely right! I took Jason’s advice and snapped up ニックラムセイ.jp (Nick Ramsay) and 陸人.jp (Rikuto, my son) and pointed them both to this blog.
Now, if you do the same, you can tell your Japanese friends your site’s URL in Japanese, which makes it far easier for them to remember, and if you’re lucky, you’ll come up at #1 in Google for your name in Japanese, too! Very cool.
How to register a .jp domain name
Since I think this is so awesome, I asked Jason if he would be kind enough to write a step-by-step guide on how to register a .jp domain. Not only did he happily agree, he even let me host the page right here! So please take a moment to read, or bookmark for later, Jason’s article, Why Buy a .JP Domain Name?
If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!
I don’t think I’m going to bother with a Japanese address… I kind of think thats a bad thing having the internet addresses in all of these languages… I think it’s better to have only English as that centralizes things…
To me, it’s kind of like having more signposts pointing to the same destination. If that helps people find it, then great! Now I’ve got two English names for this blog, nickramsay.com and longcountdown.com, as well as two Japanese names, all pointing to one central location.
“I think it’s better to have only English as that centralizes things…”
You’re right, Mike, it does. It centralizes your readers to a single language and forces everyone to use the ever-inclusive, yet ever-exclusive Roman characters 😛
There are several advantages to having a non-English domain, aside from the annual fee we get to pay for the occasional visit. By guaranteeing our domain in whatever languages we choose to promote ourselves in, we’re keeping our chances for online revenue open. Although many people won’t admit it, we all dream of making it big online. As more and more non-English people come online and start using search engines, we’ll be making brainless sites that have poor machine translations of our content in the hopes that people will come and click on our Arabic AdSense ads to earn us a few hundred Riyals or Euros.
Just because the majority of the make money online sites and “zOMG click-my-links-please!” sites are all English, doesn’t mean this trend will continue.
Personally, I look forward to seeing a bunch of other language users start to see the internet the same way we English people do. Perhaps they’ll grow tired of the endless commercialism and start developing unique technologies and methodoligies that will fundamentally change the way we think about and use the interwebs 🙂
Yeah that’s a good point, it would definitely be useful for you since you live in Japan and it would be hard enough for the Japanese to know exactly how your name is spelled in English…