Domain Names

Archive for September, 2010

You want to buy a domain name; great that is the first step. Now you have to decide from which of the over three hundred sites you should purchase your domain from. Usually the first site that comes to mind is GoDaddy.com. That is perfectly fine; GoDaddy.com pays a large sum in marketing in order to attain such widespread name recognition. 95% of the time GoDaddy.com will work just fine for purchasing your domain name; however, this is not the site that I would necessarily recommend.

GoDaddy.com would not be my first recommendation because they have some odd terms and conditions that, to summarize, claim that their company will have more rights to the domain name than many business people and internet marketers believe to be fair – including myself. As a result of this, many internet marketers do not use GoDaddy.com because of the control issues associated with the terms and conditions.

I would recommend that your business picks-up a free domain name from the web host you select to utilize. The majority of web hosting plans come with a few free domain names; therefore, I would suggest that you condense everything into one step and save some money along the way. I personally would urge you to us Liquid Web, a website that provides the option of buying both the domain name and the hosting service – making your domain live. Liquid Web offers a 1 GB disk space, 120 GB transfer, and 2 free domains all for the low price of $14.95. They also offer many other option filled packages. You will also be able to build upon the start-up packed priced at $14.95. Think about it, a domain name itself usually costs about seven to ten dollars, sounds like a good deal to me.

If Liquid Web did not quite spark your interest, look into 1and1.com to purchase your domain name and web-hosting site. As long as you do not have a large amount of traffic, 1and1.com will work great for your company. They offer good deals and free domain names, similar to Liquid Web. Head over to nlprofits.com and you can get some great deals for domain names and view reviews on other great companies to work with when purchasing domain names for your business.

Registering a domain name for your online business or organization shows you are a professional willing to spend money to build and host a website. Many people try to start their business online with a free domain and free hosting. This is a mistake as they have no control over their domain. If the company goes bust you lose all your content and your reputation.

Reasons to register a domain name

Professional presence

People are more likely to do business with you if you have a real domain name rather than some obscure website address.

Professional email address

Sending email from an email address that contains your domain name gives your business greater credibility than using gmail, aol, or hot mail address that often are used by spammers.

Permanent home for your website

Even if you change hosting companies your domain name will remain the same. You can take it with you wherever you go.

Branding

Your permanent website address is associated with your business, therefore it will steadily build your brand on the Net.

How to register a domain name

1. Brainstorming

Create a list of possible domain names you wish to use as many of them may already be taken. Try stringing several words together, use numbers or hyphens between the words.

2. Check availability

Visit Godaddy.com (or your favorite domain name registrar) and enter your suggested domain name in the “start your domain search here” box. It will immediately tell you if it’s already taken and suggest some alternatives.

3. Purchase your domain name

Depending on the suffix of the domain name you will pay approximately $10.00. Some registrars may charge up to $25.00. If registering with Godaddy they will try to add additional services during the registration process such as privacy, email, hosting, web design, etc. I suggest opting out of these extra services. You can always add them later when you’re ready to make an informed decision.

4. Change the name servers

You need to point your domain name to the server hosting your website. Ask your web host for the name servers to use.

To change them in Godaddy log in to your account. Go to the domain manager to view all your domains. Check the box next to your domain, then click on name servers (top navigation bar). Delete the current name servers then enter the new name servers and click OK. It will take 24-72 hours for the changes to take affect.

5. Domain name parking

While you are waiting for your website to be built your domain name registrar will often provide a temporary web page (only if you are using their name servers). If you hired a web designer ask them to upload a temporary web page to the server that tells visitors your web site will be coming soon or is under construction.

5. Web design and hosting

Some domain registrars (such as Godaddy) offer web hosting and/or web design services as well. I recommend only registering your domain name with them as I’ve received many complaints from clients about their extra services. Find a reputable web design and hosting company so you’ll be a happy online business owner.

Tip

Don’t delay registering a domain name. It may get registered by someone else if you wait too long.

Before you can get started in your venture to make some extra money online you should understand a little bit about how domain-names and web hosting works. I will also talk about free hosting solutions which you can use and are perfectly OK to help you start off without having to pay for domains and hosting.

A domain name in simple terms is a name in which you type in to your web browser to access a website. For example Google.com is the domain name we use to access the Google website. The.com part at the end is what is called a domain extension and there are many different extensions you can register, for example.net.org.co.uk and many others. Some domains such as.edu (Education) and.gov (Government) are restricted for the appropriate professional organizations to register. When registering a domain name it must not have any special characters, you can only use A-Z 0-9 and the – (dash) character.

Domain names are very inexpensive with many costing on average of 5 per year for registration. To register domain names you can buy them from places such as GoDaddy or NameCheap. I personally prefer NameCheap.

So how do domain-names work? Every computer or server on the internet has an ip address which is a set of 4 numbers. An ip address looks something like 12.345.67.89. Because these numbers are complicated and difficult to remember, the Domain Name System (DNS) was created. The DNS holds records of every domain name and which IP address (the ip address of your web host) is associated to it.

For example the ip address 66.154.38.209 of the web server where my website easycash.org.uk is hosted. If you type in to your browser 66.154.38.209 you can see you will get my EasyCash.org.uk website.

When people type easycash.org.uk what happens is the Domain-Name-System points your browser to the IP address 66.154.38.209.

Now that we know how domains work lets go over the actual web hosting. Many web hosting packages are now extremely cheap and the cost of running a website for 12 months is not a lot of money. My current preferred web host is HostGator.com. Prices there start at around 3 per month for a simple package up to 15 per month for a reseller package. With a reseller package you can host as many websites as you like (you still have to pay for the domain registration).

Once you have signed up for a web host they will provide you with (usually in your welcome email) their NameServers. NameServers sometimes come in the format of an IP address like we talked about earlier or may look like ns1.yourwebhost.com & ns2.yourwebhost.com. Once you have your nameservers from your web host you need to login to the account where you registered your domain name and set them up.

There are websites out there that will allow you to host your website for free, however they generally don’t allow you to use your own domain name. You will be assigned a domain that will look something like yourdomain.freewebhost.com.

Two of the biggest and best free we hosts are webs.com and tripod.com. Both of those also offer great packages for building your website and make building a website very very easy. Building a website in general can be simple and I would always advise you to build a site on your domain and web hosting over the free solutions where possible.

Get your free web design at MyFreeWebDesign.co.uk.

How can finding expiring domain names lead to a profitable business? As thousands of users are setting up shop on the internet every day, good keyword domain names are getting scarce. The importance of a catchy domain name should not be underestimated in today’s online world of advertising. Businesses end up forking over thousands of dollars to buy already owned domain names that meet their market needs. In order to go about finding soon to expire domain names, you should know more about the overall process of how a domain name actually expires.

A domain name doesn’t really expire on the expiration date. There are stages it goes through before becoming available to the public again.

First stage: This is a 40 day grace period, and during these 40 days the owner can still renew the domain at the normal renewal cost.

Second stage: Next is the redemption period, and again the owner can still renew the domain (while paying an additional fee).

Third stage: Now enters the 5 day deletion period, where on the last day the domain name will become available for all.

The overall process is about 2.5 months. Finding and capitalizing on expired domain names isn’t exactly rocket science, but there is a learning curve to it and the right knowledge can help you be successful.

Let’s say you’ve come up with a brilliant product, and want to set up a website to sell it. Unfortunately the best keyword domain names for your product are already taken. This happens more often than not, which is why it’s important to understand how domain names expire. Once you understand what you’re dealing with, you’ll be better prepared to capture that all important domain name for your product or business.

While monitoring the three stages of domain name expiration, you should be considering how much you’d be willing to spend to claim it. Sometimes the competition outweighs your ability to pay top dollar, but other times you can find some great gems. Remember, you have to measure the cost of the domain name against the forecasted loss of sales you can endure when people aren’t finding your website properly. It’s difficult to put a price on branding, but that’s exactly what you’re trying to do by capturing a strong domain name.

The importance of having a good domain name is that if you want your website, product and services to be successful then having a good domain name should be top of your to do list.

The product or service that you are doing will have to be around your domain name in some way for instance if your website is about gardening and you have a name which is about fishing then you will have problems with traffic, so have your domain name on the same line as your site.

6 months old What you should look for when you are going to buy your domain name is to try and get one, which is over 6 months old, and you will be able to get a good check done on it.

Keyword rich The domain should be short and keyword rich in other words try not to get a long domain name that is hard to pronounce and not brandable.

Indexed in Google You will want to make sure that the domain name that you buy is not banned, blacklisted or sandboxed by Google. To find out about a name you might be interested in go to Google.com and enter the search term below. Site:

http:// domainname. com

As long as the name shows up in the listings you will know it is indexed.

Page rank This is another very important part of your domain name as Google ranks a score to each page and it ranges from 0 to 10 (the higher the better).Ideally you should for a page rank 3 to make anything from your proposed site, but starting off with 1 and 2 is still not a bad start when you are just starting out.

Valid When you are buying a name you will have to make sure it is valid so double check the name and you could use the below tool.

http:// valid rank.com

Traffic Any name that you go for you will want it to attract traffic and we all know how that is important to your business, I would also put it through the Alexa ranking for your site and that way you will have a good double check.

Domain deals So where do we go to find domain names, I would look in eBay just enter the search term “domain names” and click search. Now what I have found in the past is some people selling the domain names do not know the real worth of some names so you could pick up a bargain. So with what I have told you about domain names go now and get one.

A very simple strategy in internet marketing is to use domain names to set up mini sites with revenue. At one point, it seems every marketer was falling into the trap of using long tail keywords to set up a website. Their reasoning behind this was the keyword weight it would carry. While this works sometimes, this a large amount of top level domains one would need to buy to market all of the products. This is why using a generic domain name, and then attaching sub-domains to the top level domain, is a very cost efficient strategy when setting up mini sites.

First off, let’s look at what a generic domain might be. You might be able to use a domain you already have. If not, then just pick something short, with some initials in it. At one point I was looking for a domain, and what I wanted was taken. So, I just added 123 at the very beginning. On other domains, I have added the term “our” at the front of something. I also have a site with my initials and then the word “ceo” after it. There are numerous possibilities for this.

The other thing I would not worry about is the “.com” part. If you need a “.net” or any of the other endings out there, then get them. Remember, these are for mini sites.

The next areas to look at is the definition of a mini site. This is a simple website, with maybe 7 – 10 articles on, optimized for ad revenue. All of these articles need to be original articles. You should also have each page of this site optimized for only one keyword phrase per page. Some people use a blog for this, but I find it just as easy to use static HTML pages. Once the site is done, you will not need to add more pages to it, although you could if you wanted to.

So, to set up the mini site, you will put it on a sub domain. This means you will have a site like: keyword.genericdomain.com. You can use a long tail keyword phrase here, but don’t make ti too long. Search engines spiders are smart enough today to know when you are keyword stuffing. This is how you should setup all of your mini sites.

The next step I would take is to link to the sub domains from the main domain. This will also help the spiders find the sub domain sites. The other way to link to the sub domains is via article marketing. I would write a few more articles, and send this traffic to the mini sites that are on the sub domains.

The best part of the sub domain route with a generic domain is the fact you can setup as many mini sites you want for no additional cost. The more sites, the more revenue you will make. Speaking of revenue, use whichever method you want to. Many people like to use AdSense for these, but I have found that highly targeted mini sites with a specific product will out produce AdSense almost all the time. So, think outside of the box.

Hopefully, you now see the value of using generic domain names to set up mini sites with revenue. It is one of the simplest forms and most cost efficient ways of setting up websites in a short period of time. Try it out with a couple of sites first before you dive into, just to make sure you get your strategy down. Then once you know what works, start producing mini sites and watch the revenue start increasing.

Domain name is the address you type into your web browser ending in.com or.net or.co.uk ie Google.com or Google.co.uk or twitter.com Domain names can have a big influence on your SEO (search engine optimisation) and can influence the speed of indexing and how high your site is ranked, and can also have a very direct impact on how much money you can make.

It can be a difficult choice. You are looking for an SEO friendly domain. Keyword research is very important in any optimisation as ideally you are looking for a keyword that is searched for many times, but has low competition. This is an idealised view, and rarely seen so easily, but you get the general picture.

Once you have you a keyword or phrase it is important to use this phrase when choosing a domain name. Although the search engines haven’t come out and admitted it, all the evidence points to the fact that they see keywords and phrases as an important factor in ranking.

There are three categories of keyword matching options. Exact match, phrase match and broad match.

Exact Match matches your keyword or phrase in the domain exactly. For instance if your keyphrase is ‘bird seed’ then the exact match domain would be ‘birdseed.com ‘

Phrase match has the keywords in the right order in your domain but with an extra word also to create a new phrase. Using the bird seed example that could be ‘buybirdseed.com’

Broad match has the keywords in a different order, also with an extra word or two thrown in. For example ’seedbirdonline.com’

There is also non keyword optimised domains, which don’t have any of your keywords included. Again taking the above example this could be ‘avianfood.com’

Generally non keyword phrases are most suited for companies with an established brand, or trying to build a brand. This doesn’t mean that these domains can not be used for your chosen keyphrase, it just makes it a little more difficult. With all other ranking factors being equal then the search engines will rank in the following order: Exact, then phrase and finally broad.

Four letter domain names are quite simply domains containing only four characters with each of these characters being a letter. Very recently, all four letter domain names in the popular dot com extension have been registered. This leads to some interesting observations and opportunities.

Not too long ago, a small pool of four letter dot com domain names were available for registration. The number steadily declined over the past two years as individuals and companies began to realize their unique value. On November 22, 2007, the scales tipped and the last of the available names in the pool were registered. Now whenever one expires it is immediately captured through a drop catching service or registered by a new holder.

Four letter domains have many benefits. Primarily, they are short and easy to remember while remaining economical for most individuals and businesses. Any shorter and the name would be much more difficult to acquire. Any longer and the name would start to lose some of its cache. A short, memorable identity provides a powerful tool for marketing and brand building. Look at some recently created brands which fit into this category: xBox, iPod, Digg, Hulu.

Four letter domains are relatively scarce. There are only 456,976 possible combinations. While this might seem like a large number, compare this to the total registered dot com names of over 55 million. As increasing number of individuals begin to see the unique value of these names, there may not be enough to go around.

In the wide world of domain names and the internet, four letter domains are certainly an area that bears watching.

A domain name is very important in establishing an online identity for your offline and online business. It is important that you choose the right name for your website to ensure maximum benefits from the name.

So here are a few tips you can use for effective domain name registration and maintenance of your website on the internet.

i.    The name you choose should be a memorable one that both identifies and represents you. Take as long as you want to think of a name that best describes your business as you shouldn’t regret your choice later on. Think of a few names and then check on its availability as there is always a chance of one of them having been registered or trademarked already.

ii.    You will have to choose a reliable company to register your domain name with as there are many companies that offer domain registration for free and at a fee. It’s better to stay away from the companies offering free registration as you there is no guarantee the name will be your sole property for as long as you need it. As registration costs vary from cheap to expensive ones that offer some extras, its better to do your research first before you decide on the registrar you want to work with.

iii.    It’s better to register your name with companies that not only help register your domain name, but also helps with its maintenance. So make sure you go through the terms of services of the company, and the length of the agreement before registering your domain.

iv.    Usually, companies offer service packages that range from basic to premium, depending on its rates and services offered. Its better to choose your package based on your present and future needs as though cheaper packages may look attractive at first, it may turn out to be quite expensive in the long run. Consequently, it can’t be said that the most expensive package is the best for your website as sometimes, these companies offer too many services which you may not have any need of.

v.    If your business is a popular or industry specific niche, there is a chance of other businesses having similar names in perhaps the plural version or using a different extensions. Using such names will mean a cut in your potential market share and business. In such cases, its better to register your name using domain name variations.

vi.    Check to see if any websites or domains are already registered in this name yourself so that you can redirect searches or clicks to your website. This may look expensive at first, but it is well worth it once you find targeted traffic reaching your website.

Of course, if you find doing all this tedious and time consuming for you, you could always hire someone else to do all this for you. This way, you can concentrate on your business while all this work is taken care of by someone else.

I’ve had quite a few offers for my domain names over time. There is one kind of offer that I have received numerous times which I would like to warn my readers about. It is a domain name appraisal scam covered up as a domain name enquiry.

Basically what happens is a domain name appraisal company acts as a party interested in the purchase of your domain name. They put together an approach letter like the following email that I received for a domain name of mine:

Hello,

We are interested in xxxx.xxxx

It was listed in auction (your address was found via WHO IS).

Please submit your price for consideration.

Our company is involved in software development/support business. Now domain invetsing/reselling is just an additional direction of our investment strategy.

Looking forward to do business with you.

Regards,

After I received this letter, I replied with something like this “Thanx for the offer. I am planning to develop the domain name in question into a profitable website. However, I value the domain name at $2500, and I will sell it if an offer of that amount is made”.

The next email they sent went right for the juggular:

Hello,

$2500?

Ok.

However, before we buy the domain, we have to make sure that it is worth the amount that you claim.

It is nothing personal, we just want to be sure our investment is valuable. We have seen this post at a forum we frequent which shows a link to a reputable appraiser which you can use to appraise the domain.

Please follow that link to get the name appraised and once you appraise it, send us the appraisal certificate.

Once the appraisal is made, we will talk about making a deal.

Do you use escrow? We prefer it.

Regards,

Nice touch, they did not actually include the appraisal link in the email, but rather pointed me to a forum where they had previously posted their appraisal link. Also, notice the mention of escrow… of course they are concerned about the security of the transaction, there is nothing else on their mind . This domain name appraisal scam is very well planned and very well executed. They want to come across as geniune, and I bet a lot of people have falled for it. After all, a great offer for some of your domain names does not come along that often.

I replied that I value the domain name at $2500 and that I do not need a domain name appraisal company to appraise the domain name for me. They hounded me with another 3 or 4 emails begging me to do an appraisal before they gave up.

The moral of the story? Be careful about approaches for your domain name. Think about this – if you are interested in a domain name and you decide to write to the domain name owner to inquire about purchasing that domain name, are you really going to ask that domain name owner to pay for appraisal for their own domain name? I would think you will do your homework, find out how much that domain name is worth, after all, you are purchasing it because in your eyes that domain name is valuable, and only then will you make an offer. People who ask you to pay for appraisal for a domain name you own are one thing and one thing only – DOMAIN NAME APPRAISAL SCAMMERS – so be aware.