What Questions Should You Ask Yourself When Selecting Your Domain Name for Your Home Business?

So you want to be an Internet superstar, work from home and earn six figures cool we are working on doing just that. In previous articles we have discussed figuring out what you want to do for your home business another term for this is finding your niche.

We then discussed a few different programs available to help you if you are a Veteran, or Single mother. (There is a lot more of this to come)

We will now discuss step three in designing your income producing website.

Proper domain name selection.

When selecting a domain name there are a couple of key questions you should ask.

Is my domain name easy to remember?

When purchasing a domain you want to keep it as short as possible and avoid hyphens whenever possible. For example H-B-S.biz is much easier to remember then Home-Business-Success.biz. In this case we bought both names. We use the shorter domain to put on business cards, flyers, and brochures. When a person types in H-B-S.biz they are automatically forwarded to our long domain website. The long domain URL has two of our keywords in it, which should help with the search engines. The bottom line is the shorter and more memorable the domain the better. It is suggested to put keywords into your domain name wherever logically possible. Try to keep the domain short and use a maximum of three words. If you want to brand your company you can insert your company name in the domain. Be as specific as possible, for example if my company was called: XYZ marketing and one of my websites was about Home business I could purchase the domain XYZHomebusiness.com.

In, this example we have both our company name and keywords, so this would be a good domain name to choose. With some niches such as Home business the competition is tough so as in our case you might have to settle for a domain name with hyphens in it. Try to avoid it but it is not the end of the world.

Has anyone owned the domain prior to me?

When I was first looking for a domain name for H-B-S, I was happy to discover that Home-business-xxxxx.com was available so I bought it. Big mistake. We proceeded to build the page and gather incoming links as well as doing some manual submissions to directories. After a few weeks we noticed that our site was not getting crawled by the search engines. We also noticed that any emails I sent to Jeff using the new domain got blocked by his email spam program Spam Cop. We both wondered what the heck was going on. It was then I started to do some investigation to find out if someone else had owned the domain name prior. There are a number of ways you can check this. The first way is to go to Alexa.com and use the Wayback machine. Check to see if the site has ever been published on the net before. If the site is about Gambling, or a Pill store I suggest you look for another name.

Should I only buy a .com URL? Two years ago I would have said yes, however, today a .biz URL is fine. A majority of people who surf the net are aware of the .biz extension and your customers should also be able to remember it easily. As with the hyphen example above if you can get the .com and a spammer has not used it in the past go ahead and get both the .biz and .com versions.

Should I buy all the extensions available? In a nut shell yes! With the cost of a domain name starting at around $7.00 each I suggest for peace of mind and future growth you buy the .com, .biz and .org variations of your domain name. I know of a case where a person put up their site and built it for six months very successfully. Well about three months later the person discovered someone had bought the .biz version of their URL and was trying to steal traffic. Listen you are investing in your future success, spend a few extra dollars now to avoid a potentially major headache in the future.

Should I buy a domain name from a Domain auction? You should save your money. There are thousands of combinations of domain names that will fit your business. Take that money and invest it into your website promotion perhaps through Pay per click or pay for submission to a few of the upper level directories.

I hope this article has helped you and will make your domain name selection easier and more profitable.

Steve is a partner in the writers shack. http://thewritersshack.blogspot.com/

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