Saturday, August 11, 2007

6 Steps to Get Started With Domain Names

Every business requires some front to promote its products. With the blazing growth of World Wide Web the use of internet as a means of promoting your business is very essential. The first step in this field is to make a global presence, and the best and easiest way to do it is to make a website. This way your portal is open to the world. Here are six steps to get started with domain names.

First step for getting started is to make a professional website. The website content and all the feel and look of the website should be very professional. The numbers of websites are growing at a tremendous rate and this requires you to make your website stand out.

Second step is to have a domain name that best describes your website. If the website name describes the website or your business then it will look very professional.

Third step for the domain name is to book your domain name early as the names are diminishing at a very fast rate. For this you can contact the hosting services. There are numerous hosts providing you with required domain name.

Fourth step for domain name is to take advantage of the websites that offer the domain names that they have already acquired and will sell them to make profit. This way you can get the domain name even if you have missed it at the first time.

Fifth step for domain name is to use a domain name that is straight forward and very obvious. The person should write the name of the product he is looking for and add www and .com at the end of the service name. It should lead to your website. This way you can generate traffic without much support from the search engines.

Sixth step for domain name is to acquire all the extensions available at present like .com, .org, .in etc. this will help you in future growth of your company. You can use these names for specific products.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

How To Choose A Good Domain Name

What is a domain name?

A domain name is like “google.com”. A name that people use to find your website.

How to choose a good domain name?

If you already have a business name, you might want to register a domain name that is as close to it as possible for branding purposes.

Also consider the following:

A good domain can have the following few attributes, but it does not necessary need to have them all:

* contain keywords

* gives an idea to people to what the site is about

* short and brandable

* no confusing characters or dashes

* .com over other extensions

Contain keywords

Keywords can be in domain as makemoneyonline.com contains the commonly searched phrase: “make money online”.

How do I know that it is a commonly search term? A simple way is to do a search for your targeted keywords on overture keyword selector. This is only an estimated number based on yahoo/overture search engine searches. This does not contain Google searches, which is a much larger number. The more searches the better.

A good domain with good keywords can help bring in organic traffic, which means visitors that enter your site from a search engine.

This can be good if you plan to only promote what your domain means.

However, do remember that a domain name like a business name should not be limiting. A domain name like buyleathershoes.com is not good if you want to sell more varieties of shoes in the future. What if you want to sell track shoes or sandals, for example? When people look at the domain buyleathershoes.com, they wouldn’t think that you would sell any other thing that leather shoes, and this brings me to the next attribute, brandable names.

Brandable names

A brandable name is something like google.com, digg.com or even like my site omicra.com(which teaches internet marketing for businesses), they can give an idea of what the site is about but they don’t need to. It is short, easy to pronounce and easy to spell which makes it easy to remember.

Remember when people don’t know how to pronounce a word or name, they would avoid saying it. This can be very bad for your website because you are stopping people from spreading your website by word of mouth.

The good thing about such domains is that they can really be used for anything. You can sell leather shoes or even hair spray because it does not limit your website. However, when this is good for a multi-purpose or web2.0 site, it is not necessary good for sites such as those that want to promote single products. A person who wants to buy a Linksys router, for example, would rather go to linksysrouters.com than medora.com if they have no prior experience of both websites.

Domains with dashes

A domain like buy-leather-shoes.com has an disadvantage over a domain without dashes because when you want to tell it to people by mouth, you can’t just say “buy leather shoes dot com”, you must say “buy dash leather dash shoes dot com”. This is not good if you plan to do any word of mouth promotion like radio promotion, where the dj has the read it out. It gets hard to remember too.

This is rather ok for smaller sites that you don’t plan on expanding much like if you have a business that sells leather shoes at main domain like brett.com, but you are running a promotional campaign on buy-leather-shoes.com because it is more descriptive of your business than brett.com. Still, however, it is disadvantaged compared to buyleathershoes.com.

A small advantage that dashes have is that it can make things clearer when there is a need for example expertsexchange.com can be “expert sex change” when it actually means “experts exchange”.

Why a .com over a .net?

People remember .com better. If your site is buyleathershoes.net, a number of people won’t remember the extension and go to buyleathershoes.com instead. However, a .org might be more appropriate to some organisations than .com.

Where do I register a domain name?

I would suggest namecheap. Enter the domain name in the text box and click search. Follow the instructions from there.

What if my domain is already taken?

Then you have 2 choices. Buy another domain or buy the domain from the current owner. But remember that the current owner may be a domainer, they buy domains for the sole purpose of reselling so they might charge you a high price. If the domain is currently being used for a popular site, the owner probably won’t sell it.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Creating A Domain Name for Easy Profit

Creating a domain name without knowledge can cost you money. Don't believe me? Listen to this. If I cannot find your domain name or even remember it after you told me about it, I cannot do business through your site. There are so many websites on the Internet that you will be lost in cyberspace even before you can get off the ground! Registering a catchy, well researched, and keyword-enhanced domain name is as good as money in the bank.

The ignorant chooses a domain because it sounds good, or they just like it. The wise will have no such compunctions and will in fact research the name exhaustively just to get the right fit. If you are choosing a domain name on the World Wide Web for any reason other than charity, then you will want to make the most profitable choice you can find.

Here are some of the best reasons to think carefully when creating a domain name. Get this right and your profit could be assured, just from the domain name alone.

Get A Domain Name That Will Increase In Value Each Year.

How will you know that your domain name will be more valuable with time? You can start by looking at trends in the industry or niche that you want to operate in. The days of the analog telephone is dead so you may not want to register a domain that includes the words analog telephone if you are in that industry. Instead look at where the industry is going. Internet, cellular, satellite, or mobile phones are in and will be here for a while so if you are operating in the telephone industry, it would be safer to go with words that have a future.

Create A Domain Name That Will Get Some Traffic

Do some quick research to get some ideas using the Google ad words tool located at this address: adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You will get a graphic of how many searches are made for that term and how many people are trying to market on the web, using that term. You can also type in your term at Google.com to see how many websites are on the Internet with those terms. Enclose the word or phrase in quotes like these ( " ") to get more accurate results. For example "holiday camping gear".

Combine Keywords When Creating a Domain Name to Get the Best Fit

If you think about it, it makes sense. If you are selling bull horns, automotive air horns, or goat horns you may want to include those words into your domain name. Remember that the days of single word domain names are long gone. These days you need to find short and preferably memorable phrases that will help you out. Combining words that tell your story will immediately tell your customers what you are selling.

Find a Good Registrar to register your domain names

There are many of these registrars competing for your business. Prices range from $1.99 to over $30.00 for the rights to use a domain name for a year. ICANN currently has an accredited list of registrars. Go here: icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html and browse their list. You will also find a good list of TLD’s (top level domains) here as well. Do not get hung up research however. Remember that a .com is still the most popular form of the domain name. If you type the domain name with www but without a TLD, your browser will default to the .com form of the name.

Find Quick Ways To Profit From Creating A Domain Name

Now that you have a domain name and hopefully a website, here are some ways to use the domain name and quickly profit from it:
1. Redirect an affiliate URL to the domain name without setting up a website.
2. Park the Domain Name for profit from type-in, and search engine traffic
3. Develop the domain name and resell it for a profit later
4. Develop a brand around the domain name and sell advertising on it
5. Use the domain name as a gateway to send traffic to other sites you own

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Choosing A Domain Name The Smart Way

When you are setting up an online business you should take great care over choosing a good domain name. This article looks at how to choose a domain name the smart way.

Top Level Domain
It is best if you use .com as your top-level domain. Generally .net and .org domains are not seen as being as professional as .com domains.

Keyword Optimized – It is good if your domain name contains keywords relating to your topic. This helps your site to rank higher in the search engines. You can use a keyword tool such as the Overture Inventory Search – now Yahoo - to check which keyword combinations are searched more frequently.

Easy to Remember – Your domain name must be easy for visitors to remember and should be memorable so that they can type it correctly into their browser without having to look it up somewhere.

Shorter Name – Although domain names can be up to 67 characters, your domain name should be shorter, preferably seven characters or less. Shorter domain names are easy to remember, easier to type and less susceptible to mistakes. Unfortunately domain names with seven characters or less are harder to come by these days, so you may have to settle for something slightly.

Say It Aloud? - If you need to tell someone your domain name over the phone, will they be able to easily spell it correctly the first time?

No Trademark Conflicts - For goodness sake make sure that your domain name is not infringing upon some company’s trademarks.

A good place to check if a domain name is available is Whois.org.

Keep these tips in mind, and you will be well on your way to choosing a good domain name.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

6 Quick Steps to Create More Money in Domain Names

Selling domain names is a business that is rapidly gaining in popularity. Many people like to be creative and work out names that they can buy up and sell at a profit. Here are 6 quick steps to finding profitable domain names and reselling them.

Step 1: Get a Broker
You can find lots of different domain name brokers out there, but you need to make sure they will do more than just sell you names. These brokers offer different services, so make sure you choose one that fits your needs.

Step 2: Choose Sensible Names
If something sounds like a clever domain name, don’t buy it on that premise alone. Make sure someone else will also want to buy it--otherwise, let it pass.

Step 3: Research
Always make sure the name you are buying has not bee chosen already. There are registries you can check to make sure someone else doesn’t own it. Profitable domain names begin with making sure it’s yours.

Step 4: Buy Different Versions
If you can, buy different versions of the name--someone may want to use a similar domain name as a secondary web link and you can market the names just that way. For instance, you might want to purchase ColumbusFlorist.com and CreativeColumbusFlorist.com.

Step 5: Buy Different Versions, Part 2
In addition to variable names, try variable suffixes like .org and .net in place of .com. This can give you a large variety of name choices for your profitable domain names.

Step 6: Tell the World
Even if your broker provides advertising and space for a listing on their website, you should still write about your domain name business in blogs, forums, chat rooms and even MySpace and Facebook.