This past Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the our church’s last day of vacation bible school.
My wife, as well as a number of volunteers, had faithfully served throughout the week in various capacities.
Across the United States, and likely throughout the world, Vacation Bible School is one of those events that kicks off summer in a special way.
This year was special because our oldest son was able to attend have his little heart seeded with the Gospel. What a pleasure it was having him arrive home daily to share all that he had learned.
To top off the week of learning, our church has a fun day Friday filled with a few activity stations, such as a Koni-Ice Truck, bounce houses, and a bubble machine (a new addition and a hit with my boys).
I arrived early to surprise my oldest and actively participate in taking him from station to station.
As I waited on his class to arrive outside in the church parking lot, I happened to stumble upon a local Austin company using a new gTLD as their domain name.
This company was responsible for providing the bounce houses and used the domain AustinBounceHouse.Rentals.
It wasn’t until I was reviewing event pics that even I noticed this company was using a new gTLD.
It was because they used “http://” at the beginning of the domain address which I thought was odd until I didn’t notice .com at the end.
Of course this got me scratching my head and wondering who owned AustinBounceHouseRentals.com.
Well, AustinBounceHouseRentals.com is registered, but is currently a GoDaddy Parked page. Personally, I was hoping it was going to redirect to AustinBounceHouse.Rentals, but that wasn’t the case this time around.
Giddy that a local small business would attempt to use a new gTLD to represent their business, I was eager to crack open Google to see if they we’re ranking.
To my surprise, they ranked VERY well, meaning position 1 or 2 on the first page of Google, for the following terms:
- bounce house rentals
- bounce house rentals austin
- austin bounce house rentals
And who said or claimed a company, especially a local small business, couldn’t rank well using a new domain extension?
It’s company’s like AustinBounceHouse.Rentals that more local small businesses need to hear about and see garnering success using new domain extensions.
Sure, .com has been King for the last 20 years and counting, and likely to remain this way for another 10 or more years.
But this shouldn’t stop companies from using new domain extensions.
In fact, I encourage companies to purchase the matching .com of their new gTLD and have it forward to the new gTLD.
It was my hope that AustinBounceHouse.Rentals would have owned and redirected AustinBounceHouseRentals.com to AustinBounceHouse.Rentals.
Nevertheless, AustinBounceHouse.Rentals has a decent mobile-friendly website. It was easy to use and understand.
Finally, you know I had to go and do a bit more digging to see what other domain name possibilities existed for Austin companies offering jump house, bounce house, and moon walk rental services.
Here’s what I came up with (* denotes available domain names at the time of posting):
- JumpHouseRentals.com
- JumpHouseRental.com
- MoonWalkRentals.com
- MoonWalkRental.com
- BounceHouseRentals.com
- BounceHouseRental.com
- JumpHouse.Rentals
- MoonWalk.Rentals
- BounceHouse.Rentals
- ATXBounceHouse.Rentals*
- AustinMoonWalk.Rentals*
- ATXMoonWalk.Rentals*
- ATXJumpHouse.Rentals*
- AustinJumpHouse.Rentals*
- ATXBounceHouseRental.com*
- ATXBounceHouseRentals.com*
- ATXMoonWalkRental.com*
- ATXMoonWalkRentals.com*
- AustinMoonWalkRental.com
- AustinMoonWalkRentals.com*
- ATXJumpHouseRental.com*
- ATXJumpHouseRentals.com*
- AustinJumpHouseRental.com*
- AustinJumpHouseRentals.com*
- AustinBounceHouseRental.com
- AustinBounceHouseRentals.com
Not a bad list of available domain names, especially those containing the city abbreviation of “ATX”, short for Austin.
In my opinion, there are a few domains to snag in the list above, especially the .com domains.
I didn’t get a chance to speak with employees of AustinBounceHouse.Rentals to understand why they choose the name that they did.
However, seeing how well they’re ranking, I’m certain they are doing quite well with organic search driving business as things heat up here in Austin and surrounding cities.
AustinBounceHouse.Rentals made the last day of VBS one to remember, cherish, and love for years to come.
Speaking of love, my boys brought home a “I ❤ VBS” sticker, and I immediately it as an emoji domain: I❤VBS.ws.
And yes, just like spotting companies using new domain extensions in the wild is exciting, there’s another phenomenon starting to trend right at this very moment: emoji domain names.
Read up and have fun… see you around!
As a domain investor and business consultant, Alvin actively participates in daily domain auctions. Outside of auctions, he passionately shares his views, opinions, and vision for how businesses should and should not use domain names to generate greater customer growth and revenue.
