What’s in a name?

I am going to talk about choosing a domain name – or a subdomain if you are going the free route.  What?  A domain?  You haven’t even told us what we are going to be doing…we haven’t even set our goals yet.  

Yes, I know.  What I am doing in these first few steps is laying heavy groundwork so that you have a platform.  Setting a goal without having any idea of what you framework or platform is – well, it is just not realistic.  Once you have an idea coming together about what you will be working with, you will be able to much more clearly set up your goals, strategy, and tactics.

So what does a domain name have to do with it?  Well, it really is going to get you waist-deep into DOING something to start your business.  It is also going to give you an anchor-point to which you can look and see that you have a place in which you can start building your business.

You are going to have a store-front which will be a blog for our purposes, but your storefront must have a name.  So why don’t I just pick out a name and go with it you say?  Obviously, if you think about that, you understand that names can help, hurt, or do absolutely nothing for a store (blog in this case).  More importantly, with online marketing, there is the ever-present need for SEO – search engine optimization.  While I hear different takes on the importance of this and that with SEO, there is no question that choosing a domain name related to your topic/niche is a definite benefit.  When the search engines are looking for sites in a specific category, the domain name and content determine how high your site is going to get listed.

So now you have to make a money decision.  Are you going to shell out any money for a domain?  Well, you don’t have to – that is the good news.  You can start, and run an online business with very little money.  You can get your own blog for $0 down and just $0 per month – good deal huh?

In fact, if you are not sure that you are serious, I might even recommend that you go this route.  There is really nothing wrong with doing this if money is really tight.  I do however recommend that you get your own domain and hosting service if you can afford it and are sure that you really want to take on the challenge of running an online business.  Why?  Because you have a lot more control.  In addition, you look more professional to your readers.

If you must go the free route, the rest of this is not really going to apply as much, but read it, and follow along anyway, you may learn something.

So how do you choose your name?  This is getting into some higher-level internet marketing, but I am going to make it pretty easy.  You should do a little research to determine you keywords – I am suggesting that you try using your keywords as part of your domain name.  Such as my keyword or actually phrase (when I first started) was make money online, so you see this domain name has the money online portion – making it pretty clear what this blog is about.  Now there is more competition for this key-phrase than just about anything else out there – so don’t pick it!

Remember that I said you needed to get your general idea of what your niche is going to be?  Well, now is time to refine that niche.  To do this, you need to pick your general terms and use a few tools to whittle it down to a more specific niche.  So how is this done?

I just randomly picked dog training as a niche.  Now I know from past research that this is really quite a large market.  If you pick dog training as your keywords, you are going to have heavy competition.  Suppose that you have a general interest in dog training, but are willing to narrow-down the scope of the market in which you are going to go after.  You can get the idea of where you can focus your efforts by using Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool.  It is pretty simple, just type in your general keywords and click Get Keyword Ideas.  This will bring up a list of keywords that are associated to the keywords you typed in.  If you were to go there today, you would see that dog training had approximately 1,500,000 searches on Google in July.  Wow, that is a lot, you should use that as your keywords: dog training!  Well now, hold on Sparky, that isn’t all you want to look at.  

The reason why you may not want to just go ahead and pick dog training to be part of your domain, is that you may want to modify it.  Sure dog training has the greatest amount of searches on the top of that list, but did you look further down?  The serious searches were dog and dogs.  Okay, no big deal in this case, because if you have dog training in domain name, you have got the dog part covered.   

[side note: Since you are in the vicinity, you may also want to look at advertiser competition.  Take a look at the greenish bars to the right of the keywords.  These show how much competition there is for specific keywords.  For advertising, this is crucial, and we will use this later, but for picking your domain name, not as important - just something to be familiar with.]

Okay already, I want to get my domain name.  Well too bad!  Nah, just kidding.  If you are anxious to get it, just go to www.GoDaddy.com and use their handy-dandy domain name finder.  I am pretty sure that the domain you have in you mind is already taken.  You will have to try a bunch of combinations to find a name that you really want, so be patient.  The nice thing is that GoDaddy’s search results include suggestions to help you out. 

Once you have found a domain that you will be happy with (at least to start out your online marketing career), go ahead and buy it if you must…or you can wait till next time when I talk about hosting, free hosting, and blogs.  Yes, we will talk about the free stuff too, I promise.

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This entry was posted on September 21, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Starting Out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.