Domain name hunting we will go.
Posted on October 17, 2008
Filed Under Domains |
If you’re serious about getting into affiliate marketing, and have already got some ideas about the niche you want to promote then you’ll be wanting to grab yourselves some pretty good domain names.
There are a number of things that you want to bear in mind when looking for a domain name.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords!
You should always choose a domain that contains keywords that describe your website. When you appear in the search engines it will help attract visitors if the domain name contains the word they were searching for.
Remember there are various ways of operating an affiliate site. You could run a magazine style site with lots of articles with links to relevant products or you could run a price comparison site, or just a more general shop but with products from lots of different merchants all brought under one roof. If you want to be doing price comparison then look for words that indicate that too - compare, comparison etc. Unfortunately I missed out in the auction that Kieron recently blogged about - I’m sure it wouldn’t have had anything to do with his post though! I had spotted it too and was quietly watching it waiting to put in a bid - then one of the biggest blogs in the industry mentions it. Ho hum. Unfortunately my meagre funds don’t stretch to £1000 for a domain just yet in any case.
The shorter the better.
Its easier to remember a short name so the shorter the better e.g. shoes.com would be better than mysiteallaboutloveleyshoes.com. But best of luck trying to get a one word domain name nowadays. They will come up at auction but be prepared to pay a high premium for them when they do.
Try and stay away from using initials as the domain name just to keep it short - a jumbled set of letters won’t make much sense to most people.
To hypenate or not
Ideally a domain name should never have more than three words in it - and if you do have to use three, consider whether the hypenated version is available as well. A hyphenated domain name is much easier to read, but a non-hyphenated one is probably easier to type e.g. all-about-domains.com or allaboutdomains.com.
If you go for only one option - someone may well come along and buy the other one, and when it comes to a customer remembering your name and typing it in, it will be easy to make a mistake and you will end up losing visitors to the other site.
Plurals and Misspellings
There was an interesting thread on the Affiliates4u forum the other day which revolved around the plurals of domain names. So consider whether you want to run into a similar issue. I have chosen to take this route with a couple of my domain names. Within my niche more people seemed to be searching for price rather than prices -so I have snapped up both - and it avoids the issue referred to in the thread.
What domain extension?
It depends on your market. If you want to market only in the UK then a .co.uk extension will be just fine - and next after that would come the .org.uk.
I have chosen to buy the .com extension for all of mine - as they were available. Over time it might be that I want to run an american site/shop on the .com extension so I thought I would get them sorted at the outset. You just have to make sure you manage the redirect properly so you don’t run into the duplicate content issue.
How to find a domain?
I use a couple of tools to help: domaintools.com which has always come up with some helpul ideas but doesn’t show the .co.uk as a domain extension, then 1and1.co.uk who have a good suggestion tool as well. There are other sites which also tell you what domains are coming up for renewal, and which ones have just expired - and which ones are up for auction!
I use 1and1.co.uk as my registrar. It’s easy to transfer the DNS settings to a different host if that’s what you are looking to do but they also offer some good deals on hosting themselves.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy these!or read my previous post: Help getting over Niche Researcher’s block
or read the next one: Affiliate Networks - Paid on Results
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