Registering Your New Domain Name
October 4, 2007
In yesterdays Researching your Niche post, I talked about just a few of the many ways, you can find out if a Niche is worth pursuing. We found that the Grills category has very good potential to deliver some great affiliate commissions due to the demand, volume of eBay sales, and high average selling price! Now that we know succeess is possible with the Niche, it is time to start developing a domain name.
Lets begin by looking at what makes up a Good Domain Name for a Niche Store!
For the sake of argument during this section, please remember that this is going to be an eBay Niche Store website. Developing the domain name, while still important, has to be weighted with certain factors in mind. Even though we are NOT developing a full community and social type site, we do still want to have some of the “Sticky” factors that a good domain name will provide!
When I decided to pursue residual income through Build a Niche Store and Niche Marketing, a few of my primary goals were:
- Sites that require minimum maintenance. (1 hour a week is enough)
- Sites that can be fully operational, quickly and easily. (More than 6-8 hours is too much)
- A Process that can be refined and deployed on a large scale. (100+ websites)
- Traffic that is primarily search engine driven. (Good for future domain sale opportunities)
- Domain names that are easy to resell. (Someday, someone may want the domain and traffic more than I do)
Many years ago, it was simple to get the name you wanted for $70.00 a year! Since Al Gore divulged his creation to the public, the web has become very popular and the price has dropped to $8.95 a year and it’s alot harder to find a good name! I have literally spent entire days (12 hours) trying to find that perfect website domain name!
For a BANS store, success does not lie in the domain name! If I cannot find a target name within 5 minutes or 10 searches, I go into overdrive and start using the ill-fated hyphens! My goal is to get the most out of the name that I can, but not get hung up on searching for hours on end! I prefer to spend that time driving the traffic… which equates to the affiliate earnings!
Length of Domain Name
Typically, longer names are harder for a repeat visitor to remember! Another way to look at it.. they are easier to forget! For a BANS store, I do not think the length is as much of a factor in your domain choice, as the majority of your site visitors are not going to be type-in hits. For me, Niche Marketing with Build a Niche Store is not about building a social network site that will grab 25000 repeat visitors each day… it is about grabbing 500 or more UNIQUE visitors every day, introducing them to the Niche you are promoting, and sending them to the place they can buy it! I am the middle man…
That being said, you should try to find a domain name that is as short as possible and closely related to what your Niche site has to offer. If you can squeeze a few high volume keywords into your domain name, all the better! There will be some examples at the end of this section! 6-12 letters is common and easy enough to find, 25-40 letters is not the way to go!
Effect of the TLD - What comes after the dot?
EVERYONE will tell you the same thing.. if you can get a .com domain name that fits into your site, do it! .com is by far the most widely recognized and easiest to remember! If a .com is not available, .net works just fine for a search engine driven site! To a search engine… mycarsforsale .com and mycarsforsale .net looks exactly the same!
In addition to this point, Build a Niche Store is already designed to use various country specific eBay feeds. Supported are: US, UK, Canada and Australia! If you want to setup your store with one of those country specific feed, you will benefit greatly by using your own country specific TDL. ie: Canadian stores can use a .ca TDL, UK stores, .co.uk etc.
The-ill-fated-Hyphen!
Once again, if you can get the site carsforsale .com jump on it! I have not read a definitive answer anywhere on this, but search engines no more or less love, if you have cars-for-sale .com and develop it in identical fashion to the other! Again… where is most of our traffic coming from?
Dont just try - USE your Keywords
Like this example site, if you have a Niche that is about Grills, why not start with that word? In this case, we are selling grills. People look for Grills for Sale all the time… Gas Grills, Charcoal grills, BBQ Grills… you get where I am going. This Niche Site is also about helping people find Grills for sale on eBay, the worlds largest auction site. It took only a few minutes to find the domain for this project… GrillAuctions .com was registered yesterday!
In all likelyhood, if you want to use the grill category yourself, there are hundreds still available! Try using this Domain Name Suggestion tool for ideas! First type in the word Grill. As you can see, MANY of the terms in our keyphrase report from yesterday show up as well!! Now type in “Buy Gas Grills” - how many focused niche markets do you see?
Trademark and Namesake Risks
Plain and simple… if you use a company or product “Namesake or Trademark” in your domain name, you do so with the risk of losing it! I registered webkinzforu .com 2 months ago and put up a BANS site. The site actually does extremely well for such a short amount of time in the public, but I do realize that one day, I may get a letter from them asking nicely to remove it. If you even use a company name in your domain name, do so knowing that it may need to come down one day… (Good page to read)
Never use “eBay” in your domain name - they will jerk it out from you in a minute! (Read this) Besides, it is against their CJ affiliate program terms.
Enough about domain name selection - lets look at HOW you actually register a domain!
Some of you may already have domain names, I was actually quite surprised recently when I was explaining to someone how to do it and they were 100% completely lost in the process. I thought everyone knew how to reg a domain and I was wrong!
I prefer to use GoDaddy as my registrar. It is an easy to use interface and registering a domain takes 5 minutes! There are however MANY registrars out there to choose from and it is simply a preference of mine. There is a list of all registrars at: http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html I have also included a short flash clip on how to register a domain name. You should have this completed in 5 minutes or less!
Now that you have your new domain name in hand, you are ready for tomorrows segment where we will discuss the hosting for your Build a Niche Store. I will be showing two segments tomorrow, the first segment will involve setting up a hostgator account for your first domain. The second part will discuss how to take advantage of adding additional domains to your existing account!
I also want to encourage you all to drop back again later today. I am going to be announcing a Contest that involves this project! I am just working out the tracking details right now…
As always, feel free to add suggestions or comments you feel may help the community!
Mark
Comments
9 Responses to “Registering Your New Domain Name”
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Comment about “Trademark and Namesake Risks”
I am no lawyer, but I have a couple in the family that say always include a attribution in your footer and or every page. If the trademark owner See’s this they will think twice about asking you to take down a site.
Trademarks are everywhere. A trademarked/copyrighted photos or names appear everywhere. If you give attribution you are following trademark law.
This is not legal advise, just a comment.
@ Magpie -
Very good tip!
Like yourself, I really dont have a definitive answer on what a specific manufacturer/owner would like or dislike. They do however have legal rights to pull the sites down, possibly with fines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Trademarks_and_domain_names
If you visit www.DNForum.com, there is an entire forum section devoted to just that, the risk associated with infringement, including cases where owners like you and I were slapped!
ALL being said, as long as you do not go overboard and present your site as the manufacturers, you likely wont get bothered. If you DO get a letter… its a quick shut down.
What do you think would be better? 2keywords.NET or 2-keywords.com? Basically I either register the .net version or the .com with a hyphen.
It is a great keyword for type in traffic if only the .com was available!
@Matt
For BANS sites - I think the majrity of the traffic is going to come from search engines and referral marketing.
If you can get a good .com, I would jump on it. If however it is not available, I wont hesitate for the .net or hyphenated domain names, the convert well also for the traffic source.
Mark
I went ahead and registered the .net version. I dont know why, but I am really against the hyphens. Maybe because it is harder to tell someone (and for them to remember) that your website is “blah dash blah dot com” rather than “blahblah dot net”.
Anyways… I think I found a good niche! Thanks for the guide! It refreshes my memory every time I make a new bans site.
[…] Registering Your New Domain Name(s) […]
Hi
I’m just starting out, and have a question for you regarding domains.
I have a good generic domain name ideal for auction sites, to make a niche site I can use sub-domains thereby adding my niche wording at the start of the generic domain name.
Is there anything you can think of that would cause this to be a bad idea?
Thanks for the excellent info - the fact you are not charging makes it all the more credible in my eyes.
Hi -
Thank you for the nod on the series - The next week or two will be very interesting and enlightening when I start to talk about category tree building etc.
In regard to the domain name and subdomains. Search engines view the domain as the authority ie: mywebsite .com, if you were to add carseats.mywebsite .com, the engines will actually view this as a completely separate site, thus losing any benefit of the parent. You would be better using mywebsite .com/carseats/ and install the software into a separate directory for each niche you want to build off of it.
ALL link juice will be spread back to the parent domain versus different and individual subdomains.
In my opinion, you would be better served on a site like this to use a blog like wordpress as the main page, then create a horizontal link structure across the main header section that links to each individual shopping section.
Mark
Thanks for the reply.
The way I was thinking would be that each subdomain site would have a persona of its own, they may not really link to each other in a logical way either - the generic name would be there as a ‘brand’ if you like.
I understand exactly what you are saying though, and put that way I can see the merits in having an umbrella site with the sub sites coming off it.
Thanks again for all the hard work you are putting into this!