Creeva’s World 2.0

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.

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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Jour­ney To Get Paid at 2/07/2008 09:19:00 AM