When you decide to start your online marketing business, you need to create a business plan to help you stay organized and on track just as you would with any conventional business. But, one thing that is of immense importance to your online business is your domain name. Finding the right domain name for your online business is as important as wings are to a bird. When you have the right domain name, you will be reaching the right customers, you will be able to build up your business, and your website will be easy to manage because you will be able to target the right market.
Domain names nearly always fall into one of these two categories; short and catchy or long and wordy. The name you choose will impact your website and your online marketing business in a very major way. Spending time creating a great website will be wasted if you do not have the right domain name. You must develop your business plan, determine who your customers, contacts, or viewers are and then choose the perfect domain name.
Test it first
Once you have chosen the right domain name, it is of great importance that you test it. There are so many different variations for a domain name that you may have to test it many times before you get it right. You want a domain that is not too common and most importantly, one that is not too confusing. Be very cautious when using domain names with numbers in them. For example, the domain name – products4less.com will probably get confused with productsforless.com and productsfourless.com. Don’t get yourself to locked onto one specific domain name. In this instance, you would want to make sure you own all 3 domain names. There would never be any customers lost to the other websites if all three of them were owned by you and leading to the same website.
Another thought to keep in mind is if you are selling a particular product, search for it on Google and other search engines. See what the top four or five things are when you search for that product keyword. You want to create your domain name based on that keyword search so it will be at the top of the search engines. Think about when you do a search for a business. How do you search for it? What keywords do you type in the search engine to help you find that business or the products that business sells? Think of yourself as your customer. You are no different than they are. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you be searching for when looking for your online business.
What do you do if the.com is not available?
This is a very tough situation. Some marketers, including myself, feel that a.com domain is the most important domain name to own. Others, however, feel that you can be just as effective with a.net or any of the other domains available. Sometimes the domain name you like is not available with the.com but it may be available with the.net. You will have to do a little research and determine if the person who owns the.com is going to pull too many of your customers away. You may want to consider a new domain name instead.
You also have the option of buying the domain name from the person who owns it if they are not using it. Be careful here, though. Sometimes they will command a price tag that is just plain ridiculous. I have seen some domain names go for more than $50,000. That’s just plain crazy.
When searching for the right domain name, you may want to consider a few other options and number them in the order of importance. Decide which is your top pick, second choice, third choice, and so on.
Your online marketing business does not REQUIRE a.com domain name, but it is the most common and easiest for people to remember. There is such a presence on the internet these days, that.net domain names are becoming nearly as valuable as their.com counterparts. When you have made your final decision and purchase your domain name, I would strongly suggest that you not only get the.com, but also the.net and even perhaps the.info or.biz. You never know when you might use these extra domain names. I use my.net and.info domains nearly as much as my.com names whenever I am running a campaign on the internet. This is a great way to split test your ads and see where the majority of the leads are coming from, allowing you to fine tune your expenses.