Campaign Kickstart

The first step toward establishing an online presence is to register a domain name (i.e. johndoeforcongress.com).

A domain name (a.k.a. DNS entry) is like a phone book listing, it pairs a name with a number, in this case the number is the website’s IP address.

The process is simple – you can use a registration service like Network Solutions, or register through your web host who often provide a free domain with each webspace. If you register with your web host, that’s usually all you need to do to set up.

If you are using different services for the website and DNS, you’ll want to “point” the DNS entry to the webserver. That’s the essence of DNS in a nutshell.

You can -and should – register extra domains (misspellings, variations, etc.) and “forward” them to the primary domain.

Generally, it’s easiest to register your domain name with the same company who is hosting your website, but there are good reasons to keep control of your DNS registration separate from your webspace.

One reason is for a layer of protection from unsolicited SPAM email complaints. SPAM complaints are taken very seriously, and this has the potential to shut down your website; if your website is hosted by the same company that handles your domain administration, you could be shut out indefinitely. Therefore, you may want to consider using a separate DNS registrar.

As an added precaution, you could set up one of your alias domains just to handle your broadcast emails. I.e. John Doe may want to protect his official domain and email accounts @johndoeforcongress.com by using a throwaway domain for his broadcast emails. So when he sends out 10,000 emails he’ll use a return address of john@doe2006election.com. Now if someone complains, the only domain to suffer will be doe2006election.com which was only being used for one specific purpose.

A nice feature offered nowadays is private domain registration (that means your name, address, and phone number won’t be publicly available), and many domain registration services offer private registration at no added cost.