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How To Choose A Great Domain Name

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How To Choose A Domain Name For Your Personal Brand Website

How to Choose a Good Domain Name

By on July 22, 2019

Are you a personal brand whos just getting started? Are you wondering what would make a great domain name for your personal brand website? This is a question we get asked a lot by our clients and by the members of our membership, Make Your Mark Online. So lets look at some of the options available to you.

How To Register Your Domain Name

With over 370 million domain registrations as of September 2020 and a 3% year-over-year growth rate, you want to lock in your domain fast.

If youre starting an ecommerce business, you can buy a domain name when registering your Shopify store rather than searching another domain registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap.

By using the Domain Name Generator, you can find and register a domain name in just a few clicks. This will save you time getting your store live, so you can start selling faster.

If youre not ready to register your domain name yet, thats OK. You can use an auto-generated free domain name: yourstore.myshopify.com. That way, you can design your Shopify store and buy the best domain name for you when youre ready.

Read more: The Essential Shopify Store Launch Checklist

Like The Best Things In Life Great Domains Are Free

A beautiful sunrise a great conversation . a moonlit stroll on the beach theres no question that the best things in life are free. Luckily, in 2021, that includes awesome real estate domain names.

All you need to do to get yours is to search for the perfect name on Bluehost, and sign up for their amazing $3.95 per month web hosting.

Since youre probably going to be there awhile, click below to open Bluehost in a new tab so you can finish the article. Dont worry, well still be here when you get back!

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Help Yourself To Some Domain Name Generators

This is another kind of helper that you can use if youre finding it hard to come up with a cool domain name, and thus, by extension, your business name as well.

These tools are very simple to use, but also surprisingly helpful. All they need is one keyword from you a seed keyword and, in return, they give you tens or even hundreds of suggestions, full of valid and available domain names that you can register right away.

The best such tools include:

  • Business name generator by Shopify works similarly to the above, and also helps you build a Shopify store with the domain name of your choice.
  • Nameboy is a bit more old-school especially in its design but its still useful. This one needs more specific input, and does a better job once you have a general direction you want to follow with your name.

Check The Domain History Via Wayback Machine

Domain Name: Picking the Best One for You

Note: This one is worth checking even if youre getting a new domain name. In some cases, the domain name youre trying to register may have been registered in the past but then abandoned by the owner. Its still good to have a look at what was on it.

There are a couple of ways in which you can look up a domain names history. One of the more popular ones, and one thats also within anyones reach , involves Wayback Machine.

This is one of the first tools of its kind. Quite simply, it lets you enter a time machine, so to speak, and have a look at how any website used to look in the past.

When I say any website, its not actually any website. But you can expect to find most websites that had any noticeable traffic at any point in time. In our case, doing a check via Wayback Machine allows us to see whether the domain were interested in has ever been used for anything significant, and, if so, whether it was all kosher or not.

For example, if you look up this site, youll get records dating back to 2013:

Its safe to assume that this site didnt exist before then . When you click on any of the records, you get a snapshot of the site back then. Quite handy, isnt it?

If youre buying an existing domain name, it would be a good idea to go to Wayback Machine and browse through every month of the domains history, just to make sure there wasnt anything shady going on at any point.

Recommended Reading: How Do You Know If A Domain Name Is Available

Protect And Build Your Brand

To protect your brand, consider purchasing various domain extensions, as well as misspelled versions of your domain name. This prevents competitors from registering other versions and ensures your customers are directed to your website, even if they mistype it.

Related: Using multiple custom domains to control your online identity

Choose The Easiest To Remember Combination

Domain names came to be because humans have limits on their memory. While you can skip digging into the neuroscience, you should keep these limits in mind when choosing your domain name.

Specifically, the more stress you put on working memory, the more humans struggle to complete tasks. Theres a buffer limitation on the information the working-memory can retain.

Working-memory buffer

And while this seems like a pretty common sense limit, its not as clear-cut as it sounds. How items fall in human memory depends on the items themselves and whether they associate with any other memory systems.

Which means that, although a website address like www.catsdogs.com is significantly longer than www.animalia.com, its probably going to be easier to remember for most people.

Why? Because cats and dogs make up two items, while animalia will require most people to remember three distinct items:

  • The word animal.
  • The letter i.
  • The letter a.

Obviously, this example falls apart if someone has a background in biology, but it illustrates the point I mean to make.

Whats easy to remember isnt always about concision, as recognition can trump concision. The more recognizable the elements of your domain name are, the easier and therefore more usable your address becomes.

As a rule of thumb, try to keep the elements involved limited to no more than seven.

Millers Law

Especially for our next strategy.

Also Check: How To Make A Domain Name

It Makes It Harder To Build A Personal Connection With You

Occasionally, if youre a personal brand using a business name as your domain name, your customers and clients may not feel that strong personal connection with you.

But this is something you can easily fix.

An example of this is Pete Matthew, who runs Meaningful Money. A lot of people know Pete Matthew because of the incredible effort he puts into his podcast and his content marketing. Yes, hes using his business name as his domain name. But he still builds rapport with his audience by being at the forefront of his brand. If you follow his work, youll know his name.

So if you are going to use your business name as your domain name, its important you get yourself, your name, and your face out there!

Avoid Using Doubled Letters

How to Choose A Good Domain Name

Using doubled letters in a domain name is practically asking for typos. Doubled letters are hard to read and even harder to type correctly.

If mistakes happen often enough, you may end up with someone typosquatting and stealing your traffic. Plus, having to spend even a few seconds longer than necessary trying to figure out how to spell your domain is an unnecessary distraction.

Read Also: How To Negotiate A Domain Name Price

Sometimes Dont Go For The Com

Sorry. I know Im making things confusing, but please bear with me.

There are some exceptions to the .com rule:

Chiefly, if your website is meant to cater to a local audience, consider going for a local TLD. For example, building a blog for the German market? How about getting a .de address?

Doing this will give your users that little bit of additional awareness and boost your trustworthiness by making it clear youre in their country .

But even with that, you shouldnt limit yourself to just that local domain name. You may still want to expand your brand in the future, and, if that happens, you dont want to find out that someone has already taken your .com.

So, at the end of the day, even if you want to cater to a local market, you can still benefit in the long run by getting the .com version as well. And, in the meantime, you can link the .com to your local domain, so, no matter which address someone visits, they still end up at the same website.

Register The Domain Yourself

Never hand the controls of your domain over to someone else.

Its a recipe for disaster.

Lets say you instruct an agency to register a domain for you, and then you fall out.

How willing will they be to transfer the domains ownership to you?

Or worse still, imagine if the registering party went bankrupt, or just forgot to renew the domain on your behalf.

You could lose the domain forever.

Long story short, always register your domain yourself.

Its really simple to do, so no excuses.

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The Best Names Are Already Taken

Lets just get this right out in the open before we dig any deeper. Yes, the rumors are true! You are not the first real estate agent to try to find a good domain name in your farm area! In reality, there have likely been real estate agents and speculators trying for obscure local domain names in your area for more than a decade.

Dont freak out, though. Were not telling you this so youll get discouraged, but to keep you from wasting time searching for the perfect domain name.

Dont Give Up On Seo Entirely Though

How to Choose a Great Domain Name for Your Blog

Dont get me wrongjust because Im saying that is difficult and will take work doesnt mean you should just give up on SEO entirely. You should always follow SEO best practices on your blog, and engage in PR to get backlinks. Just know that you have to be in it for the long haul for any SEO you do to pay off.

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In A Nutshell Selecting The Right Domain Name Is Important And Definitely Better To Get Right The First Time

The old saying goes, the good ones are always taken, and so it goes with domains. As of November 10th, there were a total of 124,405,801 domains across the .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, and .US top level domains . Overall, this means its becoming harder and harder to find available domains that are short, easy to remember, and dont cost you an arm and a leg.

Should You Choose A New Domain Extension For Your Website

Recently one of our readers asked our thoughts on the new domain extensions. As you already know that apart from the popular dot-com extension, there are many new domain name extensions that you can choose from. In this article, we will answer the question: should you choose new domain extensions for your website with pros and cons?

What are Domain Extensions?

Domain extensions or TLDs are the last part of a domain name. These are the letters that appear after the dot and to the right side of the domain name. For example, WPBeginner has a .com domain extension and Wikipedia has a .org domain extension .

To learn more about domain name system, see our beginners guide on what is a domain name and how do domains work.

The first domain extensions were .com, .net, and .org. They are still the most popular domain extensions.

As time passed, new domain extensions were introduced. These included country specific domain extensions like .co.uk or .com.de, and generic extensions like .travel, .app, .mobi, .photography, and more.

Today, there are hundreds of domain extensions available that can be used for starting a website.

You can register a domain name from one of these top domain registrars. Some registrars offer more variety of domain extensions than others. The cost for each domain extension will vary, and some of the new ones are quite expensive when compared to the popular .com, .net, and .org extensions.

Should You Choose a New Domain Extension for Your Website?

Also Check: What’s A Good Domain Authority Score

Consider How Your Domain Might Be Pronounced

Word of mouth is a great form of free advertising. You want your customers to be comfortable telling their friends and family about your site, which they wont be if they dont know how to say it. This is why you want to pick a domain name that is easy to pronounce. Before officially registering for a domain, ask someone not intimately familiar with your business how they would say it based on how it is written.

If you need more help coming up with potential domain names, check out the following articles:

How To Find A Domain Name

How To Choose A Good Domain Name Domain Name Generator

Click the start menu button, and click control panel.Domain broker service godaddy auctions domain privacy & protection domain transfer bulk domain transfer domain name search check a domain names availability if you want to know the availability of a domain name, simply type the name into godaddys whois search field and well let you know if the domain is available, or not.Even if theres an active site, it never hurts to ask, right?

Find information on any domain name or website.For over ten years, we have been helping business after business come up with the name that.Here are some tips to help you choose a catchy domain name:Hi barrycraggs, follow these steps to find the domain name:

If its taken, you can search for your domain name using our whois lookup.If not, chances are good that you might be able to buy the domain off of the current owner.If the domain that you wanted is already registered, pull up the domain in your browser and see if theres a site on it.If you are looking for a fast and safe domain name checker,.

If your domain is taken, this means that it is either reserved by the registry or registered by someone else.If your domain is taken, we generate available domain names and extensions you can register.If, instead of domain, you see workgroup, your computer is not a member of any domain.In the control panel, click performance and maintenance, and click the system icon.

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