What is a domain name?

It is your “call sign”, your “url” , your “.com” address.   In the beginning, the name you choose may not be that important. But, as your business grows, and more time and effort is spent branding and linking back to your domain, this could become quite valuable to you.

Some Rules to Follow When Choosing Your Domain

  1. It doesn’t have to be a .com.  It can end in .org, .store, .net and many other things.  The reason people tend to stick with reserving the “.com” is that it is easiest for your customers to remember if they are typing it in, and, if you ever do become large, you will not want someone else to own the “.com” of your name because some of your traffic may end up being redirected elsewhere.
  2. Keep it fairly simple.  Long names are harder to type.  (However, most people do tend to find you through some kind of link.)
  3. Think of the bigger company’s you know – walmart.com,….   subway.com  very simple and identifiable.  If it is one word, let it be the key or main name of your business.
  4. If you are building a blog, or a business that is about you, many people simply use their first and last name as their domain name.

The Process:

  1. Decide what the name of your business will be
  2. Come up with several suggestions of what you could use as your domain name.
  3. Go Here  (Namecheap) and type in your domain name suggestions and see if it is available.
  4. If you can’t find the first thing you wanted, read below

What if my name is not available?

If the “.com” that you wanted is being used by someone in the same type of business that you are in, you might want to consider picking a slightly different business name, otherwise your customers could get quite confused, and end up at the other business as opposed to yours.

If the .com is not available, but is being used by someone in a very different line of work, perhaps you shouldn’t give up on the name.  You could consider “tweeking” it a little:

  1. You could use an abbreviation.   (NBA.com)
  2. You could make your name longer.  One great formula combines a noun – describing what the business is, combined with a descriptive term – either an action or an adjective.  (TransformYourWebsite.com)
  3. Consider adding suffixes like store, book, blueprint to your name.
  4. Are you married to the actual business name you chose?  Could you change the name slightly?  Try using synonyms.

Don’t get too overwhelmed by this step:

  1. This is probably not the only domain name you will ever buy in your lifetime.  Once you get started, you will find all sorts of domain names you like and will purchase.
  2. Domain names are relatively cheap (usually $10 – $15), so it is not the end of the world if you buy the wrong one initially.
  3. Domain names can be changed.   This is more of an advanced concept, but it CAN be done.

If you are going to become a “collector” of domain names, a good place to go to keep your domain names is NameCheap.    You can keep them all in one place, and you can point them to whichever hosting provider you’d like, whether is be Bluehost or someone else.

 

Want to Learn More?   Check out our 5 Day Website Building Course.