A. One Website, Many Domain Names

It's an unfortunate but inescapable fact that a domain name that satisfies one of the goals listed above may sabotage another. For example, a domain name that gets lots of people to your website quickly may make a crummy trademark. Take coffee.com; it may be an excellent domain name, because many people who are looking for coffee vendors online are likely to type the word coffee into their browsers. But coffee.com wouldn't qualify as a trademark for a coffee-related website, because the word coffee in that context is generic—it describes the product itself. So if your website were named coffee.com, you wouldn't be able to do much about goodcoffee.com, blackcoffee.com, columbiancoffee.com or cupofcoffee.com. But if you named your coffee website something like javadelights.com, you would have an easier time of chasing away anything that was similar in sight, sound or meaning. Coffee.com or javadelights.com? What a choice.
Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds—you can claim several domain names and route them all to a single website. In fact, you can have an unlimited number of domain names leading to your unique website. This is because underneath every website lurks a set of numbers (your Internet Protocol, or IP, address) that identifies your unique location on a particular Internet server. Your Internet service provider can set up a system that routes multiple domain names to your IP address, and so to your website.
The only factor limiting how many domain names you can use to bring users to your particular website is cost. NSI currently charges $70 to register a domain name for a two-year period, so registering ten domain names would cost only $700, a modest amount for many Internet startups.
Because Internet users vary in how they seek out goods, services and established businesses on the Internet, the more bases you cover the better. So the owners of a coffee-related website might, as an example, register cupofcoffee.com, coffeeyumyum.com and cupofjoe.com as well as javadelights.com.
Another way to leverage a domain name is to create variations by adding words to the front of it, with another dot. For example, if you were using www.jelly.com and wanted to promote the New England jams and jellies you were selling, you could also use www.Vermont. jelly.com, www.Maine.jelly.com or NewEnglandjelly.com and so on, without registering additional domain names. These domain names could link to specific parts of your website; your ISP could set it up for you.
You're free to create as many variations like this as you can think of. Just be sure to add another dot when you add to the name. The domain name www.Vermontjelly.com (without the dot after "Vermont") would be a completely different domain name from www.jelly.com, and you would have to register it separately.
A potential downside to this strategy is that some folks may forget to include the extra dots when entering your domain name in their browser, and as a result will get a "no server found" message. If they take the time to error-check, though, they should be able to figure it out.