You had a great idea for a new website and you immediately hurried off to search for a domain name at a registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap…only to find you can’t come up with a related domain name that’s actually available. It’s a situation most webmasters have found themselves in at one time or another. So what do you do? Often times, you end up buying a domain name you’re not all that happy with. Next time this happens to you, try checking out the secondary market before you give up on finding that perfect gem. GoDaddy Auctions is sort of like eBay for domain names. Although domains there can go for tens of thousands of dollars, don’t let that discourage you. There are thousands of domain names available for much, much less than that. Some are even cheaper than the typical annual renewal fee so you may even find one for less than ten bucks. If your budget will allow you to spend a few hundred dollars or so, there are some great two and three word dot coms available in that price range. Many of these domain names are several years old, so you may even get the advantage of having an aged domain. It’s easy to narrow the field of available domain names using GoDaddy’s flexible search feature. You can plug your keywords into the search box and find domains that begin with, end with or simply contain your selected keywords. You can narrow the range even more by selecting a minimum and maximum price. You can also choose to look at only certain domain extensions like .com and .net. This can be a great way to find some good niche type domains. To show you how easy it is using a niche like dog training, I entered the words “dogtraining” in the search box, set the keyword parameters to “contains”, selected a price range of $100-$500 and chose to show only .coms and .nets. A sample of the results is shown below. Looking at that list, I see some good opportunities if I were planning a website about dog training. DogTrainingHints.com would be especially attractive to me and at less than $300, it wouldn’t break the bank if you were expecting your site to make a decent monthly income. What about doing a site targeting cow dogs? CowDogTraining.com would be perfect! I did another search using “homeinspect” as the keywords to search domains targeting the home inspection niche. StandardHomeInspections.com wouldn’t be a bad domain name at all for the home inspection market and if I were targeting the New York City area, NYCHomeInspections.com would be...
Read MoreThis article is a guide to domain names as they relate to blogs. As I have mentioned before, I believe that blogging on a free weblog platform like blogger.com is a big mistake, primarily because you do not own the domain name and therefore are not building equity in your own blog brand. In this article I have created three videos to guide you through the process of selecting, registering and configuring your blog domain name. Before You Begin Choosing a blog domain name is the second most important decision of your blogging career. The first is to choose your topic, so for this article we will assume that you know your subject and are ready to decide on the blog’s domain name and get it registered and pointed at your hosting account so you can begin to use WordPress. Choosing A Blog Domain Name In this video I log on to two of my favorite blog domain name brainstorming tools. They are both slightly different and they will speed up the process of finding a name and help you come up with word combinations and synonyms that you wouldn’t normally think of on your own. 1. Domains Bot and 2. Bust A Name. Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video. Registering A Domain Name for Your Blog Registering a blog name is a relatively simple process, that will be straight-forward for anyone that has done any e-commerce or online shopping. There are a couple tips that I cover in this video that are worth catching. These include how to save up to 15% on your blog domain name and a brief discussion on the privacy aspects of owning your own domain name, including a couple tips for protecting your privacy when buying a domain name. Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video. Pointing Your Domain at Your Hosting Account In the last video of the blog domain series, I show you how to log into your domain registrar account and update the blog domain name’s DNS (domain name server) setting so that they are pointing at your hosting account. You will need to have already signed up for blog hosting in order to complete this step as the DNS settings are supplied by and specific to the company where your blog will be hosted. See the following video for a walk-through of the process of updating your blog’s domain to point to a WordPress hosting account. Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video. Advantages of Having your Own Blog Domain The primary advantage of using a blog domain name is to own...
Read MorePicking a domain name for your blog is the second most important decision you’ll make when starting a blog (what to blog about is the most important). Most people who are buying a domain for the first time make the same mistakes, so I thought I would write up a crash course for buying a domain name. Here are some brainstorming tools that I use frequently to find great available domain names: World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com has a great domain search tool that gives you a list of alternative domain names when the one you want isn’t available. Bust a Name Domains Bot They all work really well but are quite different so try them both to get two different points of view when thinking up domain name ideas for your blog. Here are my guidelines for purchasing a domain name: The Basics for Domains get a .com if you can, .net only if you can’t find a good .com no hyphens or dashes no numbers avoid having any of these words: my, the, your as short as possible, ideally 3 words or less, four at a maximum If you follow those guidelines you’ll avoid most of the common domain name mistakes. Then you want to move to more advanced considerations like: How easy is it to tell someone the name, in a conversation, like over the phone and have them find your site? A great domain name works even when someone can’t read it. Watch out for expressions that are said out loud one way and written down in another. For example: Your name: South by Southwest You register: SouthXSouthwest.com (most users will type in southbysouthwest.com instead) This is the best reason not to use numbers in a domain name. If you tell someone your site is: 2 by 4 dot com Do they go to: twobyfour.com or 2by4.com How does it look when it is written down? Some site names look better when written down. This is a reason to keep it short. TrialLawyerAssociationLLC.com would be much better as: TrialLawyers.com Watch out for unintentional or hidden words in a domain name. I recommend showing your potential name to a couple people before you purchase it. You may have a slang, or common swear word in your name without even realizing it. Here’s an example from a top tech site on the web: Experts Exchange. http://www.expertsexchange.com/ Can you figure out why they should have chosen a different name? 🙂 The Last Thing to Remember Unless you are really really trying to jump on a fast moving trend, the best tip I can offer when buying a domain name is...
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