Virtual Assistants – use your own domain for email

Many emails are sent by business people, and particularly business owners, using free email accounts such as hotmail, yahoo, and others.  Often these addresses don’t appear professional and it’s hard to know if the sender is genuine or not. If you want to provide a professional image, consider this:

1. A domain name reflects your business name or your particular industry – why not use it as potential for telling people who you are and what you do?
2. Because of number one above, it helps people to remember your email address.
3. Using a free email account will often mean that you can’t have just your name, but often a variation of your name with numbers because there are already 345 people with your name using that free service too. Why not separate yourself from the crowd?
4. The cost of a domain is quite cheap these days: somewhere between $34 and $66AUD for a .com.au or .net.au or similar and $10+USD for a .com, .net and similar with periodic sales at much lower rates.
5. A domain name email compared to a free account email is looked upon less suspiciously in the current climate of scams, spam, phishing, viruses and others that float around via the internet. I know that when someone requests our VA services via our job request form using a yahoo or hotmail address I tend to be wary. And I’m not usually surprised when I respond to their email if it bounces – it almost makes me wonder should I have bothered?
6. If you do set up a website later on you don’t have to notify people of a new email address – you’ve been using the domain name all along.
7. If you change internet service providers or free email account services you don’t have to notify people of a new email address – you just get the new service to forward any email from those accounts to your domain address.

If you don’t yet have a domain, or wish to get more, you can purchase at acsdomainservices.com for non-Aussie domains. For Aussie domains (.com.au, .net.au, etc) I recommend either CrazyDomains or CheapDomains.  I use both myself.

I should add that I know many use gmail these days. I do too – great filter system and also provides a backup online – easy to use access.  However I still use my domain name (vadirectory.net) and run the pop account through gmail to retrieve and filter.    In fact, I have a few domains being retrieved via email and then delivered to Outlook.  I found this very useful when I was overseas 2 years ago – only one place to log into and I didn’t have to worry about my mailservers filling up while I was away from home.