Affiliate Marketing Beginners – Choosing a domain name

This is something you should give serious thought to.  You and your domain name are going to be buddies for a long time, and also this is the name you will be known and remembered by on the world wide web. 

Keywords.

It is a good plan to use your keywords for your domain name.  Search engines will add more weight to a domain name that includes keywords, because it is more relevant to what people are searching for.  For example, howtogrowroses.com would get higher search engine rankings than prettyflowers.com.  Take a look at your keyword research.  Visit one of the popular domain registrar sites, and make a search for one of your keywords.  It will let you know if it is available.  If it is not, you will be presented with a list of possible alternatives, some of which will include your keywords. 

Also, you could think about adding some filler words.  This could be adding ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘online’ or ‘site’ at the beginning, or the end.  For example, let’s say you are building a niche site all about dog training.  The domain ‘dog training.com’ may be taken, but some alternatives given may include dogtrainingsite.com, or onlinedogtraining.com.  These are well worth looking at, as they still contain your keywords, and the search engines robots don’t generally pay much attention to filler words, so you will still have a good shot at getting indexed for your keywords.

Extensions.

There are many domain name extensions available, but the first one that springs to most people’s minds is dot com.  If you can possibly manage to, you should buy the dot com for your business.

Free Sub-Domain Names.

A few words about sub-domain names, and why they are not ideal for your business.  Using a sub-domain would mean your chosen name is attached to the end of the main domain name of the company offering the free sub-domain (often webhosting companies). ie: www.yourwebhost.com/yourchosenname It is often the case with free webhosting accounts, that you will be given a free sub-domain, with your free hosting, but ultimately you don’t really get much for nothing these days, and in this case you will NOT actually own your sub-domain name.  It will be owned by the company who ‘gave’ it to you.  If you decide to move hosting, you will NOT be allowed to take your name with you. 

Domain names can be purchased relatively cheaply, so in the long run it makes much more sense to invest that small amount now, rather than to risk losing customers in the future, due to having to change your domain name.  There are other good points to buying a domain name, other than the fact that you will actually own it.  Firstly, it will look much more professional than a free sub-domain.  Secondly, it will give you and your site more credibility. 

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