Your Domain Name is Your Business Address

Just as a good street address is important to a bricks and mortar business, a good domain name is important to an online business.

But what makes a good domain name?

Well, first of all, it has to reflect your business. When a prospective visitor sees it, they should be in no doubt as to what your business is about.

In addition, these are the other desirable characteristics:

• It should have a dot com extension
• The shorter the better, as long as it still makes sense. All the single word domains are long gone, and most of the two word ones. If you can summarize your story in three words and they're available as a .com domain name, that's great.

For example, if I wanted to create a website that was all about coffee (a very popular subject) and use affiliate links to sell associated product, including high ticket items like fully automatic coffee machines, here are some domain names I could be investigating:

• allcoffeelovers.com
• thecoffeebarista.com
• thedailygrind.com
• coffeeforall.com

You just need a bit of imagination and just keep coming up with variations until you find one that no one else has thought of.

You may already have your domain name by following the advice given in my previous post Internet Marketing: Finding Your Niche Part 2.

TLDs (Top Level Domains) are what appears to the right of the dot in your domain name.

The name you've chosen, that appears to the left of the dot, is called an SLD (Second Level Domain).

Originally, there were just three.

.com was for commercial websites like yours.

.org was for non-profit or charitable websites.

.net was for everything else on the internet. Then .info was added for sites designed to inform and educate.

Since then, there have been a proliferation of TLDs, such as .biz, .pro, .tv and so on, with new ones being constantly added. This has happened partly because of the explosion of websites, to make more possibilities available, but also simply because the more available, the more potential profit there is for the domain name registrars.

However, this has also resulted in the .com version becoming more and more valuable and highly regarded.

The upshot is simply this. Get a .com domain for your website.

Even if you still haven't settled on your domain name yet, you should proceed with registration, as it allows you to try one prospective domain name after another until you find one that's available and can register it immediately.

There are a number of domain name registrars available. I recommend Namecheap. It's low-priced (currently $8.88 per year for a .com) and has an easily navigable website. They've also been around for many years.

Enter the domain you want and press Enter or click on the Search icon.

I've entered one of the coffee-oriented domains we considered earlier.

Namecheap will tell me if coffeeforall.com is available.

As expected, this particular domain name isn't available.

Namecheap will tell you what other TLDs are available and you can scroll down to see them all. There are hundreds of them.

But we are only interested in the .com, so let's try some other possibilities.

What if we substituted youandme for all? It's a bit long, but not bad and rolls off the tongue easily. So let's try coffeeforyouandme.com.

And there we have it, a successful domain name search. We could continue searching from here or we could decide to go with this one by clicking on add to cart and paying $8.88 for a year's registration.

You've seen how you can use Namecheap to check out possible domain names until you find one you're happy with. Then register and purchase for just $8.88.

You can go to Namecheap HERE.