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When building your online business (remember that’s what we’re doing - we’re not just Making Money Online, we’re building a business) choosing a domain name can be a real struggle.

How do I choose a domain name for my business?

What factors do I need to consider in choosing a domain name?

Here are a few hints and tips and some thinking behind how to choose a domain name.

Website domain names can be determined by a number of factors:

1. Brand Names

If your purpose in building your online business is to build a well known brand then you may want to consider the brand you’re building and aim to register the .com domain name with your brand name.

You may also want to consider registering multiple domain names with your brand name - eg .com, .net, .tv and your own country domain (Australia - .com.au etc).

2. Personal Branding

If you’re wanting to become known as an expert in your field and build your own personal brand then you definately need to register your own name as your domain name - eg I own www.nathanhulls.com and www.nathanhulls.com.au (they are both just sitting waiting for me to create some magic).

3. Keyword Research and SEO

If you are choosing a domain name for a website to sell products or make money in a particular niche then you will want to do some keyword research and choose a domain name which includes a keyword or keyword phrase which has the following:

  • High Search Traffic
  • Low to Medium Competition
  • High Commercial Value

By using a free keyword research tool such as Googles Keyword Research Tool - you can type in potential keywords or keyword phrases and Google will tell you how many people are actually searching for this particular keyword or phrase.

keyword-tool

This tool will also give you an indication of advertiser competition - meaning, how many people or companies are advertising through google for that keyword or phrase.

As well as paid advertiser competition you should do your own search in google for that keyword phrase and see how many websites are listed in the organic (free) listings - the less competition the better.

keyword-competition

Lastly you will want to see how commercial this keyword or phrase is - Google Keyword Tool will also give an indication of the Estimate Average PPC or the price per click advertisers are spending.  The higher this value the more money there is in your particular niche and keyword.

There are  a few reasons for having appropriate keywords or phrases in your domain name.

1. SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

To understand how this works, we need to first understand a basic principle of SEO.

Google, the big daddy of search engines, considers any link from other websites to your website as a recommendation, which is a good thing in their mind.

Further to that, the actual words or keyword phrase which is used to link to your site, is considered what this website is recommending your website for.

And…

When a website links to your site they will usually use your domain name to link to you as the link text.

So…

By having your primary search term (high search volume, low to medium competition, high commercial value) in your domain name, when other websites link to your site using your domain name, they will be using your primary search term as the link text.  Google then considers that your website is being recommended for your primary keyword.

2. Paid Advertising Advantage

If you plan on doing any PPC advertising, or Pay Per Click Advertising with companies such as Google Adwords you will see a higher click through, and greater effectiveness in advertising for your primary keyword when it is included in your domain name.

The main reason for this is when your ad appears for your keyword phrase, the keyword phrase appears in bold, which means your domain name will be in bold.

A few final recommendations for choosing a domain name

  1. Keep it short
  2. Keep away from trademarks and pending legal action
  3. Single Word Domain Names are most valuable
  4. Two Word Domain Names are next in line
  5. To Hyphen Or Not To Hyphen (www.yourname.com or www.your-name.com) - for another time
  6. Get your domain name NOW!

Dont be scared to register a few different domain names if you have ideas for projects you might undertake in the future, but if you’re anything like me it can become quite addictive, so you could end up with a domain name account with several hundred domain names.

There are other conversations to be had around a whole Make Money Online strategy called domaining - but we’ll leave that for another time.

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Lets Make Money!

Nathan Hulls
Internet Marketing Expert and Intrepreneur

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