If you’re a Thought Leader, the URL of your name is some valuable real estate for you on the World Wide Web. If you have an unusual name it might not be that hard to get. If your name is something like Peter Cook, however, you’re in a world of trouble. You see, Peter Cook is also an Australian Senator, a Melbourne Cup winning jockey, and the late Peter Cook partnered Dudley Moore for some of the best comedy work ever. Which of course meant that every second teacher in high school felt the need to say “and you must be Dudley Moore” to whoever happened to be standing next to me on the first day of class.

At the comedy festival earlier this year, we stumbled across the Peter Cook Bar. Not only wasn’t it named after me, I couldn’t even get a free drink there.

Which means that over a decade ago when I tried to register petercook.com, it was already set up as a fan page – and again, to the comedian Peter Cook, not to me. For ten years I tracked the URL, waiting to see if it became available. And after ten years, and after the untimely death of Peter Cook (again, the comedian, not me), the fan page people decided not to renew the URL. And so it went to auction.

I had Trish’s approval to spend up to $5,000 to buy it, but I actually figured I’d go to $10,000 if I needed to. I ended up winning the auction for $240.

I waited 10 years and would have spent $10k, which lets you know how valuable I think it is for my practice. If you don’t have yourname.com and it’s available, get it. Today! (Just go to godaddy.com or any other similar site, have a look, and pay $10 a year if it’s there.) If not, get as close as you can (put a hyphen in, use a middle initial, your middle name, or something). And if you can’t get anything close, it might be time to consider changing your name.

What URL do you use? Love to hear your thoughts – you can leave them below.