Choosing and Registering a Domain Name for Your Online Business

Continuing the series on FREE Guides on How to Setup Your Own Blog from Start to Finish, I am sure you would have chosen your niche that suits you. We now have to think about choosing and registering a Domain Name for your Blog. The truth is, your domain name plays a great role in the success of your blog.

 
Once you choose and register it, it is yours for life. In my case, I wanted to start a niche on Make Money Online Nigeria but the domain name that has exactly the letters has been registered by someone else. I would have chosen another domain name but it will definitely affect my blog later. In choosing your domain name, you would encounter problems if this is your first time at it. In today’s post, I would provide you with necessary information you need to choose a good domain name.

 
There are a couple of options open to you in choosing and registering a domain name. These are;

 
1. Self-Branding

Self-Branding quite simple is you, for example, adesojiadegbulu.com is a domain name I chose for branding myself as a problem solver who does development: Personal, Entrepreneurship and National. This allows me to talk or blog about anything I want. It also helps me cover multiple niches if I wish. If what you are after is self branding, then using your name as domain name will be a brilliant idea you should pursue.

 
2. Niche Domain

Niche Domain would relate to a certain niche or topic that you wanted to blog about. For example, let us assume the niche you chose to start a blog on is a weight loss niche then you want to try weightlosshelps as your domain name. It is important to have a ‘keyword rich’ or otherwise known as ‘long tailed Keywords’ domain name. An example of a keyword rich domain name for what we chose in the previous example is nigeriandating or similar. And you be glad to know that makemoneyonlineng.com is a niche domain in the making money online niche.

 
You could do some research by typing the keywords into www.google.com and checking results, once you have completed this exercise then the next step to think about is registering your Domain Name for your blog.

Registering your Domain Name

There are many Domain name registrars to choose from when registering your Domain Name. You may however wish to check and see what existing Domain Names are expiring or expired. Some of the benefits of buying an existing Domain Name is that there may well be ‘existing backlinks’ and the Domain Name may already have a ‘Page Rank’ in Google. This gives you an instant boost as your new WordPress Blog would receive instant traffic. Whichever domain name you want to register, I recommend that you register your domain name with Namecheap, Hostgator or Web4Africa. You could if you wish register your Domain Name and get your Web host at the same time. The advantages to this is that everything would be centralised and there is no need to change Domain Name Servers (DNS).

 
In registering your domain name, I suggest that you register a .com or .net extension, the reason being that the Search Engines normally ‘default’ to the .com extensions of Domain Names first. I also suggest you avoid the .info extension; there is a reason why they are cheaper Top Level Domains (TLD).

Originally posted 2013-08-21 14:00:54.