5 Important Points to Note When Choosing and Purchasing a Domain Name

Choosing an effective domain name is a crucial first step to setting up an affiliate business. To be taken seriously, you need to purchase a domain name of your own. It is also an important factor when it comes to branding yourself and your online presence that your affiliate business creates. Therefore, it is important that you take note of the 5 important points listed below when you have decided upon an affiliate program to promote as an affiliate business.
1. Avoid “free” domains
Your domain name will be your business’s “address” on the Internet, so it’s important that you choose the right one. That is why you MUST get your own unique name, as opposed to one you can get from a web hosting company that includes their name (eg. /YourWebHost/yoursite). With your own domain name, you can easily move your site to another host while keeping your domain name if you are unhappy with the current host’s range of services.

2. Always register a “.com” name first.
Everyone remembers a “.com” before “.net”. Even most web browswers, if the extension is not entered, will default to “.com”.

3. Consider registering other top-level domains like “.net” and “.org”
No, this is not a contradiction to the previous point. Rather, it’s always a good idea to protect your business and your domain names by registering the less popular top level domains as well.

4. Protect Your Business by Registering Product Names and Plurals
You should also go beyond the basic top level domains and register some variations on your domain as well, including plurals and even misspellings. Now, you may ask why misspellings? Because believe it or now, there are “typo-squatters” out there who make a point of registering misspellings of popular domain names just to scoop up the traffic of people who made an innocent typo error.

5. You can create your own sub-domains
If you cannot find a domain name that has the keywords you want to focus on, there is another solution. You can take advantage of a sub-domain, which is anything that comes before the main domain. Search engines love keyword-rich domains. Well, by using your keywords in your sub-domain, you can have the same effect.

by Tim Ng