Domain Names!

Your Own Domain Name

Domain name? What is so important about it? I just chat on Facebook with a friend in London just now. She mentioned to me she has a blog but the blog is not making any money for her. She then showed me her blog. My immediate reaction after I saw the domain name with .tk is- why using the FREE domain and hosting when come to writing her own blog?

What’s a Domain Name and Why do You Need it?

A domain name is equivalent to a piece of land with your name on it for yourself online, e.g. addykho.com, alibaba.com etc.  It gives you the ground you need to build your blog, online store, or whatever else you want to do online.  It’s best to buy your domain outright because then you can sell it, transfer it, do whatever you want with it and be in control of protecting it.  This makes it much easier and less stressful to work with; besides, buying a domain and hosting it isn’t all that expensive anyway.

There is no doubt that my friend is a very good writer, lawyer and musician. But no matter how many blog posts she has written, at the end of the day, the blog still does not belong to her. It is owned by the free host! The blog may be deleted by the free host whenever they want to.

If you want someone to take your blog or business seriously, you will have to get yourself a domain name and a hosting package. If you are using a free host, how would one think about your business online? If one day, your blog or website is getting very popular and worth even up to million dollars, how can you sell your website to someone else if it does not owned by you?

So think long term and get yourself a domain name with professional hosting.  I have been using HostMonster so far and I am very happy with their professional service.

Choosing Your Own Domain Name

Choosing your own domain name means picking a name for your website or blog.  It’s a very important step and it’s very exciting because it means that all the content of your website will be sitting on a piece of internet land registered under the name you would like it to be remembered, otherwise known as your domain name.  So, put your thinking caps on and get excited because it’s time to stake out your claim to the internet. You have to be careful on this because once the name is chosen, you don’t want to keep changing it anymore. Example, if I have http://addykho.com for my blog, I do not want to change to Kho.com or Addy.com anymore because people already remember my blog as AddyKho.com.

How the heck do you name your domain in such a way that it will useful to you and memorable to others?  It’s a creative process, but a very important one, so have some guidelines is nice.

1.  Use your theme keyword in the selection of your domain and use .com, .net or .org, starting with the .com as it’s the most recognizable. If you are selling or blogging about guitar, then you may want to have the word “guitar” in the domain name. You can optimize your site for search engines because you can have the main keyphrase or keywords  right in the URL (it carries a little weight in SEO) and in the title of your site.

2.  Use hyphens if you have to. Sometimes the domain name you desire is taken by others, e.g. NoMoreDirtyRoofs.com. So instead, you can always try No-More-Dirty-Roofs.com. In fact, with hyphen, Google can understand it better that it is of four different words and give Google better idea what your site is about.

3. Register your domain for minimum 2 years. For some weird reason, Google loves domain registered for longer period. If everything being equal, then the website with longer domain ownership will rank better in the Google search results page.

4. Not your own name. This is one of the biggest mistake I ever made. If you want to ‘grow’ your website and probably sell it one day, then you should not register the domain as your own name, unless you want to keep it personal and not for making money purpose. I should have registered something like Online-Biz-Ideas.com since I am posting more on Online business. If one day I want to sell off this blog, then I will be selling off my very own Name- AddyKho.com. Of course I would not do that.

If you have a theme keyword in mind, you can easily automate this process by using some online tools such as www.domainsbot.com, which will check your domain name ideas and see if they already exist or if you have to do some tweaking.  If you get yourself a Hosting Package from HostMonster, you will be given a domain name free of charge. It is a real bargain. HostMonster is having a special promotion now- $5.95 per month for the hosting!

One more important tip to you -You want the ability to host unlimited domains on your hosting package. It is ridiculous if the hosting company allow you to have only 1 domain hosted in your package.  Once your register the hosting package with HostMonster, you can have unlimited domains parked under your package, and you still only have to pay $5.95 per month!

If you want to know how to set up your own blog or membership site within minutes with your very own domain name, check out the video I made before – How to Set Up Your Own Blog or Membership Site in 9 Mins.