If you have clients or customers in other countries and work on the Internet, heres a primer to help you decipher the URLs and emails youll be receiving.

First of all, extensions. The most common are .com, for commercial sites; .edu or .ac for educational sites; .gov for government sites; and .org for organizational sites.

There are also other extensions many people make use of such as .net and .cc for various reasons, one of them being that their title was taken at the .com level, and another being cost. For example, my title is Susan Dunn. SusanDunn.com belongs to someone who sells spa products, so I had to go to .cc in order to be able to make use of my own name.

Next, the United States uses no further extension, but every other country does. The extensions of other countries will always include the .xx code in their respective URLs. Its grand to start taking familiar with them. If youre like me, youre already receiving emails with .mu or .ag and wondering where theyre from

Some of these generate perfect sense. Here are some examples:

Brazil .br
Canada .ca
Italy .it

Some generate no sense unless youre looking under what that country calls itself. Examples would be Great Britain, Ireland and Germany. Here are their extensions:

United Kingdom .uk
Ireland .ie
Germany .de

Then there are the ones that make no sense whatsoever:

Samoa .ws
Cayman Islands .ky
Mauritius .mu
Dominican Republic .do

And then there are the ones for a country you didnt know existed, at least I didnt:

Sao Tome and Principe .st
Chad .td
Kiribati .ki

In order to sell and be successful you need to understand where your business and customers are coming from, so pay attention to extensions.

You might also want to submit your internet site on search engines covering these countries which are starting to appear.

Here is a website where all the extensions and country codes are listed: http://www.bitmedia.com/info . Click on the hyperlink at the extreme bottom left saying "Internet Information."