Day 3 – Choosing a good domain
Choosing a good domain name for your online business can be tough. It is easy to get caught up here and spend way too much time trying to find a good domain name for your business. To make things easier follow the steps in this module.
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By the time you finish this module you will have selected your domain name that you will use for your business.
Brainstorm a list
There are a number of ways to come up with a good domain name for your business. The best way to start is brainstorm a list of potential business names. Spend some time creating a list of business names that you like.
These names can be a combination of words you like, ideas you like, niche related, etc. At this point you?re just trying to get a list of ideas to work with. A list of 25 – 50 is a great starting point and gives you a lot to work with. As you brainstorm just let it flow and put down anything that comes to mind.
Narrow down your list
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Now you want to spend some time narrowing down your list. At this point you want to find the ones you have the most interest in and get rid of the ones you?re not feeling. Try to narrow down your list to the top 5 to 10 that you like.
Append niche words
This is an optional step but can give you more ideas and open more domain names that are potentially available. For example: Maybe you came up with a brand name you like ?The Legend.? For this example let?s assume your niche topic is marketing. You could append the word marketing to that brand. Now it could be ?The Marketing Legend?
Or maybe your in the Yoga niche and your brand idea was ?Primal Zen? You could append ?Yoga? to that and now it is ?Primal Zen Yoga?
Append other words
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Another way to expand your names list is append words that add a flavor to your brand. For example you may have came up with the name ?Marketing Tips.? You could add words like ?Extreme? or ?Top? or ?Legendary? to come up with:
- Extreme Marketing Tips
- Top Marketing Tips
- And Legendary Marketing Tips
A great tool for getting domain name ideas that appends terms to your keywords is Lean Domain Search. With this tool you can type in any keyword and it will append words to it and tell you if the domain is available. From our earlier example ?Primal Zen? it shows the following results. (note this is a partial list for the screenshot.)
Check domain name availability
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At this point you want to take a look at your list and again narrow down to your favorites. Starting with the one you favor most do a domain search to see if it is available. There are many sites you can do this on but one of the most popular domain registrars is Godaddy.com
To do a search simply type your domain name idea into the search bar like this:
After that click on search domain. That will show you what is available:
In this case the domain choice was taken. That is why you have a list of potential ideas.
Note: Godaddy will offer suggestions of names that are available. It will often recommend different domain extensions other than .com domains. For best results it is ideal to go with a .com domain extension.
Here are a few final tips for selecting the domain name for your online business:
- Try to choose something easy to remember.
- The shorter the better
- Be careful with spelling. Numbers can make spelling of the domain confusing. And also intentionally changing the spelling of the word can make it hard for users to find.
Action Steps:
- Brainstorm a list of 25 – 50 potential business names.
- Narrow down your list to the top 5 to 10 that you like.
- Append niche words.
- Append action or brand words.
- Narrow down your list again to the top 5 – 10 that you like.
- Check domain name availability starting with your favorite business names.
- Buy your domain name.
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In tomorrow’s lesson you will be securing hosting for your new domain.
