Choosing a Domain Name Can Be Heart Wretching.

Posted by Creeva

February 7, 2008

This is originally from Journey To Get Paid.

So you have your own blog but it’s something such as creeva.blogspot.com or creeva.wordpress.com, Both of these are acceptable, but if you read my previous about brand management you’ll know that building your audience to your personal brand can help get you a larger following.

Do I need a domain name?

In all honesty I can’t fully answer that question for you. What I can do is give you some pointers on how to choose a domain that can be personal or directed towards your target audience. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before you register any domain name:

What are you trying to do with your site? Is it a personal site? Is it a tech site? Is it a business site? Now none of these really have any bearing on if you’ll ever make money - or at least that is out side of the scope of this article.
While some people are just trying to drive massive traffic to their site, what do you want to do? There are loads of spam blogs out there that just show ads and may get thousands of hits a day. I think this people have ethically sold out, but I’m not here to judge you so pay me no attention. You could register a name based of typos and drive traffic that way or come up with something unique that helps you stand out from the crowd. The more unique the site is the more cliquish and faithful your users may become, but this is at a sacrifice of larger traffic goals. This is one of the things you need to consider if your going to be driving traffic to your site. The name is part of the brand and can make or break some sites.
Is it worth the cost to you? There are many benefits to owning a domain name. Essentially at under ten dollars a year it really is a cheap investment, you can host your website, have personalized e-mail, and build upon your brand name in ways that aren’t really possible with blogger or wordpress hosting your site without owning your own domain to redirect them to these sites. Over time I’ll be writing more articles on what you can do with your own domain name and choosing the correct hosting service

How do you choose a name that’s right for you?

The questions here are similar to those from above so I won’t rehash them. My suggestions is make it memorable so no omgihavefreestuff.com. Choose something that something something about you or at least your site. Your brand is something you’ll build. Do not choose anything too long, this makes it harder for people to remember your address and it will effect traffic from return users. The shorter the better.

I personally know the agony of choosing a domain name for a project. A couple weeks ago for a project I was working on with some others I spent a good 10 hours running domain names by other people. We had a few that could work and others they thought were great for personal blogs, in the end it’s still an ongoing discussion - and we’re looking how we are going to proceed with that project. Not all of my domains that I have purchased have taken this long. I settled in on journeytogetpaid.com in a matter of minutes and had it all set up with the blog running within an hour of conception. Your strategy and length of time it takes to decide on a domain name is only limited by your creativity and your ideas.

Who do I buy from and how much do I pay?

Like everything else this is a personal choice, but let’s look through what I look for. First and foremost I check out price. I would not pay more then $9.99 for a domain name in this day and age and most people look at that as too high of a price. With coupons and cheap registrars there is no reason you need to pay $9.99 a year. The prices I usually go for is between $6.99 and $7.99.

Normally I register all of my domains in one spot and this is with goDaddy.com and they’ve served me well. Some people have issues with goDaddy.com, namely there are stories of yanking a users registration at a drop of a hat if there is a complaint (spammers be warned your domain will be yanked for e-mail spamming from what I’ver heard). Because of this I decided to track down another registrar that is not goDaddy but also is offering domains for $6.95 (not a bad deal, huh). The second company is Blackbeltdomains.com. This should give you two choices to choose from at around the same price range. The latest goDaddy coupon code I’ve used “OYH3″ - this will get you $6.95 .com domains.

Hopefully I have given you something to think about now go ahead and grab yourself a domain.

UPDATE: Wanted to let everyone know I received an e-mail from the original “owner” of the “OYH3″ code. To support this user and get his other coupon’s go to his page that contains all of his godaddy coupons.