A good domain name can become the driving force behind any successful web site. A domain name can not only drive traffic to your website, it can also become the name that people remember when they think of a certain product or idea. It can go on to become a recognized brand and make a lot of money for the person that owns it. But how do you pick a good domain name when all of the good ones are already taken? There are thousands of web sites, and every time you think of a good domain name for your own web site, it winds up being taken, or too close to someone else’s. Domain names that relate to your product may also either be too long or too obscure to remember and you may find yourself always saying, “no that not it, that’s not the one.”
Most cheap web hosting companies will provide a free domain, but how do you get inspired to come up with a good domain name in the first place? Most people will agree that it should have the winning combination of a domain name that will be easy to remember, easy to spell, and draw a lot of traffic. But you have to have some kind of method to pick the right domain name, and picking a good domain name is not so much a matter of brainstorming and being clever as it is a matter of scientific research and planning. This is because there are plenty of cleverly titled web sites that never see the top one hundred on a ranking report, much less any traffic. No, there is quite a bit more to picking a good domain name than that. Remember, if you have signed up with a low cost web hosting company, you are either trying to sell a product or communicate a serious message, not sitting around trying to be clever.
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Think about your Target Audience
Assuming that you already have a product that you want to sell, when picking out a domain name, the first thing you have to think about is your target audience. Many people make the mistake of thinking that just because they have a desirable product that people are going to buy it, which simply isn’t true. This is because it’s not so much what you are selling as who you are going to sell it to. If you understand that for any product that you can think of to sell on the Internet that there are at least five hundred or more people selling the same thing, you will understand why it is difficult to come up with a domain name that is unique. This is why you have to focus on the customer that you are selling to in order to come up with a distinctive name for your web site. In other words, iit’s the customer base that is different, not your product. In order for you to come up with a domain name for your website, you have to identify the people that you are trying to reach.
Let’s say, for example, that you are going to sell sunglasses. Sunglasses are a good product to sell because everyone buys them. However, at the same time everyone is selling them as well. This is one of the reasons why you can’t come up with a good name for your site – because all of the good names for sunglasses web sites are already taken. A better approach to take would be to think about the qualities of the people who you are trying to get to buy your sunglasses. This is called demographics. Ask yourself, are the people who are going to buy your sunglasses old or young, male or female, wealthy or on a budget? Listing all of these factors will be helpful in marketing your sunglasses. Staying with the sunglasses example, let’s say you have a supplier who can get you cheap children’s sunglasses in all of the brands and styles that are popular. A domain name for this website would be entirely different than the domain name for a website you would pick if you happened to acquire the rights to sell an expensive line of designer sunglasses.
So when you pick a domain name, it has to appeal to a specific demographic or customer. This means that you have to do some research to find out not just who else sells your product, but who buys it. By keeping this customer in mind, you may be able to come up with a domain name that appeals to them more than the ones that are already out there. Do some Internet research and make sure to compile a list about your potential customers including age, gender, income, geographic location, and any other information that you can find out about them.
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Consider Adding Keywords for Search Engines
Now that you know something about your future customers, the next step for coming up with a domain name is looking at some keywords that will go with your product as well as your target audience, and will also support your potential domain name. If you are selling children’s sunglasses, one of the most obvious things that you will find out about is that your main customer is that they will be parents on a budget. This is significant, because your domain name, which should go along with your keywords, should also have something to do with the person who is buying your product. If you are new to web hosting, key words are the words that a person types into the computer so that the search engines can find what they are looking for on the Internet. In the case of children’s sunglasses, they may put in something like, ‘cheap children’s sunglasses,’ or ‘mermaid children’s sunglasses’, or ‘kid’s shades.’
There are free websites where you can go to find keywords like these that are related to your product and how many people are searching for them. It’s time to do some research and brainstorming and come up with the keywords you think that people will be searching for when they look for your product and then decide which key words you want to rank for in keyword searches. All keywords are ranked by their popularity, so the more specific you are when picking your key words, the less competition there will be and the closer you will be to choosing a domain name.
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Branding for the Long Term
Now that you have your product, your customer and your keywords, it’s time to think about content. Content is basically the text and pictures that will go on your site and will also reflect your domain name. What we are getting into now is called branding. Branding is the identity that you portray of your product, message, or service through text and images and also what comes to mind when people think of your domain name. In the case of children’s sunglasses, content will start out as pictures of the product and descriptions of the sunglasses. These can all be placed on your website with whatever sitebuilder you use, including the free sitebuilder that comes with most cheap web hosting packages. However, you will still want to put more relevant content outside of your website, into article submission directories, and on public web pages. This means that you will need to write short articles relevant to your product. With children’s sunglasses, you could write an article called, “How to Find Non-Toxic Children’s Sunglasses” or “Cartoon Trends for Children’s Sunglasses.” You don’t’ have to write these articles right at this moment. Just write an outline for each one. The purpose of jotting these ideas down now is to narrow down the choices for your domain name. This is because part of picking a domain name is being relevant to other sites on the Internet.
If your domain name, your keywords, and your content are complimentary to other existing sites on the Internet, you are going to get more traffic and consequently, more sales. This is accomplished through links. Links are tools that connect your site to other sites on the Internet that are like yours. If someone is selling children’s designer sunglasses and you are selling cheap children’s sunglasses, they may give you a link to their site and vice versa. This is so that if someone is shopping for children’s sunglasses in general, they can find all of the sites that sell them on the Internet much easier than if they had to do a separate search for each site. If you have a relevant domain name, you become part of this chain and benefit by getting higher rankings and more traffic. As you can see, there is a lot more to picking a domain name than just being clever or cute.
There are other ways to pick domain names:
- Picking a non-related popular keyword related domain. Some people pick their domain names by using the most popular key words they can find, hoping that this will always put them at the top of the search engine by default.
- Picking a typo domain. Others pick domain names that are one letter off from existing names, hoping that that they will get traffic from the other site by default. These are risky strategies, are somewhat underhanded, and can backfire easily. Instead of trying to copy off of someone else, most research has shown that picking a domain name sincerely and developing your website organically is the best way to get sustainable traffic and genuine rankings.
- Buy an existing domain name. Another route to go is to buy an existing domain name. If you go to any domain name registrar’s website, they will have a section of domain names that are for sale. These domain names will already have some kind of Internet presence and may have some generated traffic. The registrar can fill you in on all of the details, including the price.
So by now, you have an idea of how to pick a domain name based on the overall concept of your website, who your customer is, what your product does, and how your product fits into the overall scheme of what others are doing on the Internet. Be aware that a lot of planning should go into your domain name before you choose it – otherwise you will wind up down the road without a way to generate decent traffic and sales.
