Domain Names

Archive for October, 2010

Choosing a domain name is a big decision, one that you and your business or organisation may be living with for many years to come. By getting it right from the outset, you’ll not only help increase your sales, but protect your brand. The following are some tips to consider when selecting a domain name.

Defeat cybersquatters – register your business name as a domain name

It’s important to register the domain name equivalent of your business name as soon as possible – even if you decide to use a different domain name for your actual web site. The reason for this is to thwart “cybersquatters”, those who register other organisation and businesses names and then try to sell the domain name to the business (or someone else) at a greatly inflated price!

By registering your business name as a domain name, it also prevents competitors or disgruntled customers from setting up a web site under your business name that may seek to discredit your company or organisation.

While cybersquatting can be illegal, it can be a time intensive and excruciating process to regain control over the name through legal channels – and the outcome of such action isn’t assured.

No business name yet?

If you’re just starting up and haven’t decided on a business name yet, it’s a great opportunity to ensure you can register a domain name that appeals to you and can also be used as a business name. With the Internet playing a crucial role in business these days, it’s wise not to underestimate just how much of a difference a good domain name can make to your bottom line.

Generic word domain names

Finding a good domain name that’s not already registered can be quite a challenge; particularly if generic words are involved, but it’s well worth the time in trying to track one down.

Consider registering a name containing generic words relevant to your products and services. Doing so can help in boosting your search name rankings, make it easier for people to remember your name and it will have greater resale value if you decide to sell your business or even just your web site at a later date.

Make a list of possibilities before you start your search and bear in mind that while it’s likely those choices will be already taken, they can serve as a basis for brainstorming others.

Don’t waste your time trying to find generic one-word domain names as these are nearly impossible to locate. Focus on two or three word combinations that are easy to remember, easy to relay to someone over the telephone and are as brief as possible.

Determining registration status

When searching, don’t just type names into your browser. The vast majority of registered domain names are not in active use. The only way to determine if a domain name is available is to use a WHOIS application, available on most domain name registrar sites.

Beware of existing trademarks

It’s a good idea to check whether the name you are intending on registering may infringe on someone else’s trademark or business name, but keep in mind generic terms can’t be trademarked to the point of excluding others from using the word combinations.

Good luck in your hunt for the perfect domain name!

Domain name is the name that is used when registering a personalized website. It is the exact address a surfer types when searching for a specific webpage on the net. Free domain names are being used for personal use and for those who are starting their business through the net. Having a domain name is a tough job because you have to compete with others in the net.

The domain name you are to use should be unique and catchy words that a customer or a surfer could memorize and easily remember. The domain name can be easily loaded if there is a specific term used in describing your website.

Totally free domain name are used to minimize costs in promoting one’s website. In registering your domain name to a website host, the website that your domain name is using should bear the logo of the website host you are registered to. This is called opportunity cost. It is like a two-way relationship that allows you to use the server while the company’s name and name are posted on your website. There are no fees being covered if you registered with this kind of system.

It is totally free because you do not have any control with the ad pop-ups in your website, as well as the banners ads and spam mails. One of the disadvantages of having totally free domain name is that you have no guarantee that your website is secured from hackers. There is no always an update in your website, it has limited features and there is no way you can track your customers.

The domain name you pick can affect your search engine rankings somewhat, particularly on Google. Google’s patent description discloses a lot of information about potential ways Google could use your domain name to define the ranking of your site. The Google patent states specific types of information relating to how a document is hosted in a computer network that could influence the ranking of a web site.

Google says, valuable domains are usually bought and paid for several years in advance whereas doorway or throwaway domain, are hardly used for more than a year or so. To define the value of a domain name, Google keeps record of the following information:

•The length or contract of the domain registration (one year, two years, etc)

•The address of the site owner, the mandatory administration and the technical contact information

•The strength of the hosting company where the website is hosted once you get online

•The number of all the pages in a web site (web sites should have more than just one page)

Google also states that they have a list of known “bad neighborhood” information in regards to contact information, name servers, IP addresses, etc that assist them in finding out whether a spammer is operating a domain or if the one who registered the domain name is an alias instead of a real company or real person.

Furthermore, the patent specification states that Google could check the information of a name server in several different ways. For instance, good name servers may have a blend of different domain names from dissimilar registrars. Bad name servers may host mostly adult or doorway domains, bulk-domains from a single registrar and domain names with numerous commercial words.

In conclusion, if your website resides in a bad neighborhood, Google will know about it. So, choosing an appropriate Hosting company with high ethics for the kinds of websites they host is crucial.

At a recent event, one of the speakers suggested that it would be wise to register “How To” domain names – e.g. “howtomakebetterphotos.com” and right there, while he was speaking, I went online and secured 20 or so for myself.

I want to talk a bit about domain names in case you’re thinking of setting up a Web site or getting a new name for your site.

I am a bit of a collector when it comes to domain names. For most of the ones that I’ve registered, I have not yet spent the time/money to get the sites developed… they are just “parked” for now. All in all, I have 408 names at this count. That is a lot according to some but not a lot when viewed by serious online marketers.

All the same, here are some of my best tips on getting domain names, off the top of my head:

1. Get a “.com” for sure. Everyone thinks in terms of “.com” and it is difficult for people to remember to type in “.net” or another suffix. Better yet, get several. I also get “.net” and “.org” when I really love the name. But when “.com” is not available, I get creative and find a unique and memorable name with “.com” at the end.

2. Keep it as short as possible and easy to speel (that’s a joke). In truth, short domain names are difficult to come by, as long as you adhere to Tip #1 and look only for “.com” names. You can go with longer names as long as they are easy to remember.

3. Get the plural of your name too. I paid several thousand dollars to buy “BetterPhotos.com” from someone. Get it now and save yourself the bill. Ideally, though, I only get the plural when I can get the singular version as well. People will often forget the “s”. (Or add the “s” as I found many people doing several years into building BetterPhoto.com.

4. On that note, if you get a domain name with “the” or “my” in front of it, people will often forget that as well. It’s a rare case, in my opinion, that a “my” or “the” domain name works. I have only used it when I really, really wanted a domain name and putting “my” or “the” in front of the name was the only way I could think to get it.

5. When your preferred name is unavailable, get out the thesaurus and start brainstorming. Or I think of subtopic or subtitle ideas. For example, when creativeconfidence.com was taken, I registered saygoodbyetosecondguessing.com

6. Say it out loud and bounce your best ideas around with friends and family. See if they easily “get” it – and can easily remember it and type it into a Web browser.

7. Avoid hyphens if you can. But I am not 100% on this one… I use them sometimes. The idea here is that it’s difficult to verbally relay to someone a domain name with a lot of hyphens in it. But Google somewhat likes the taste of domain names with hyphens. When possible, get both.

8. Do you see a theme here? Get multiple versions of your business or preferred name. More is merrier. I don’t want to tell you how many different versions of BetterPhoto I have (and I have still regretted missing out on a couple).

9. Get it now. Even if you don’t think you’re ready, register your preferred name right now. When it comes to registering too many names, mistakes are inexpensive. The only mistake that can cost you big time is NOT getting the name now and wanting/needing it later.

While it is relatively simple to create an online presence, it does take some time and there is a minimal cost (usually less than 30/year) to get going. There are free ways as well (such as social media marketing and some blogging sites) but if you’re looking for a dedicated website, you’ll need a domain name and a hosting account.

The wisest and cheapest way to get things moving is to pick a subject (niche) you’re passionate about, whether it’s dog walking, making jam, starting a charity or collecting Lamborghinis! The next bit involves choosing what they call a ‘keyword rich’ domain name. This is so someone looking for a website that deals with whatever your passion is, will come across your website/blog… (i.e. ilovelamborghinis.com) and so that search engines can find you as well. There is NO POINT in choosing a domain name like www.mynameisjoeblogs.com if you sell exotic fruit. No one will find you!

You can go to Google AdWords and type in some of your ideas for a domain name and they will instantly provide you with how many searches are done under your subject area/name choice. It is important to get a domain name that has a good balance between ‘competition’ (so you know people are making money in that niche) and how many ‘local/global monthly searches’ there are for your domain name idea (so you know people are actually looking for what you have to offer).

Domain names cost anywhere from a couple of dollars to hundreds of dollars or more if there’s a lot of competition for it, say, www.johnnydepp.com. Only register your new domain as your personal name (ie. JohnDoe.co.uk) if you are already well-known in your niche or trade for the reasons stated above. (You’ll want to do this later on when you start making some money and/or become famous:), so no one tries to cash in on YOU but you!) So remember, anyone wanting to buy anything about say, jam-making, will not be able to find your absolutely terrific, high content, great graphics website/blog and amazing offers from JohnDoe.com! They’re not connected in anyone’s reality but yours.

HOW TO DO IT… REGISTERING (BUYING) A DOMAIN NAME…

There are a lot of sites that sell (register) domain names such as 123-reg, NameCheap or GoDaddy. Try to purchase a domain name that has a high TLD (top level domain) extension such as.com,.co.uk,.net or.org. These are called TLD’s because they are the most popular (slightly more expensive) and are more likely to rank on search engines again, so people can find your site more easily.

Listen, at this point you are only buying the web address, so go with the least expensive but make sure you are allowed to change nameservers (you don’t need to know what this means at this point, just make sure they do allow it by calling, emailing or checking through their website – I haven’t heard of any that don’t allow nameserver changes) in case you decide you do not want to have it ‘hosted’ with the place where you’ve purchased it.

To make things perfectly clear if you’re a TOTAL newbie (that is if you didn’t know what a domain was), to use an analogy, let us say your purchased ‘domain name’ is a car (ie a vehicle to earn you money). It is just a car to which you have the keys, you’re not driving it yet and you have nowhere to park it.

To continue that analogy… we now have a brand spanking new car and we need somewhere to park it. That’s what a host does for you. It’s not enough to have your car (domain name) now you have to find somewhere to keep it (host). There are a number of good hosting packages around. Hostgator, 123-reg, namecheap all have great packages and are not too expensive.

That said, make sure that you contact their support people before you buy

to make sure you can actually get someone on the line when you need an answer and
to make sure their ‘how to’ instructions are not so obscure that a newbie can’t follow them, so get in touch and ask lots of questions.

I would recommend you use a hosting site that allows you to ‘live chat’ 24/7 with the technical staff, in case you need answers in the middle of the night UK time when your hosting company is located stateside and they aren’t open yet.

Congratulations! Now have your car and somewhere to keep it. The next thing you have to do is build a garage around it (website) to which you can invite people to come and admire your shiny new car. You can get someone to do that for you for a price, or you can do it yourself.

Want to learn more about getting yourself an online presence? Get your FREE copy of the HOW TO DO IT series…

This is a guide that will hopefully help you to understand what parking is and how this method is very productive when it comes to making money online.

The principles of domain name parking are very easy to understand, I will give talk you through the benefits and the process of doing this.

What you need first of all is a site name or domain names, now you can either register a brand new name or purchase a URL that is for sale. The benefits of buying a one that has already been in use is that it will more than likely have traffic still which is what is needed when using your domain names to park them.

There are numerous sites and forums that sell these and you can pick them up pretty cheaply, Of course this all depends on the amount of traffic and the keywords in the domain name, Just think if all the traffic a domain name gets is related to say loans or finance, this would be considered gold dust as finance related traffic is very sought after.

Ok great so you have your domain name and are ready to park it. First you will need to find a domain parking company. I use these guys here for my domain parking, them main reason being is that they allow you to customise your landing page and pay very well per click on the adverts shown on your landing page, We will discuss that later.

Once you have found a company to use and have created a account with them, you will then need to add your domain names to your parking account, Pretty straight forward so far, The next stage is about as complicated as it gets when you go out to park your domain names and this stage is where you have to change the DNS (Domain name servers) to that of the parking companies. Sound complicated but its not, and the reason you have to change the DNS is because you will be hosting your domain name on their servers, which means no outlay or messing about with hosting for yourself.

To change your name servers it is a case of going to the place where you initially registered the domain name and in your control panel you should find a part that says set name servers, here you will put in the name servers of the parking site you are using. If you are having problems doing this a quick support ticket to your domain registrar will do the trick and they will help you and even to the parking company’s support system and if they are any good they will also advise you where they can. Its does take up to 48 hours for the DNS to resolve completely so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see your landing page instantly.

So your domain name is parked and ready to be seen and generate you money which is the end result of this business, so here we go.

First things first, you will need to create or design a landing page for your names. Sounds daunting if you have not done this before, but with all the tools available with domain parking companies these days it is very easy. That is why this method is excellent and saves you time designing and creating and is done with no knowledge at all.

A few pointers when creating your landing page, personally I would fill it up with content related to your domain names traffic and also pick keywords related to your domains traffic also, this will increase your click through rate on the adverts shown by a huge amount, sometime up to 80% in some cases.

Now your landing page is created and the keyword ads are showing its time to sit back and watch your earnings come in, as you will find there is hardly any initial out lay to get started and once you have experienced domain parking not many stop. Try it out it is good fun and can be great as a main income

Are you aware of how important your domain name is? Once you choose your domain name, you will use that name as your identity on the world wide web. This domain name will be the way that your customers will associate with your product or service. You want to select a name that is easy to spell and pronounce. Besides having a good website and a great product or service, you want to have a domain name that is easily associated with your product or service.

Even though the internet has been around for a while, you might think that there would be no domain names left. It is estimated that there are a possibility of close to 32 trillion domain names available. That means that for the 6 billion human beings on earth each one could have 5 thousand domain names available to them.. There are certainly many exciting opportunities left for each of us.

The domain name is divided into three parts, The first part is common to most addresses on the web and it consists of http://www, The second is the part that you get to select. The third part is the extension such as com, org, edu, etc.

There are several rules that you need to use when you create your domain name. Several marks are not allowed such as colons, exclamation points and forward and backward slashes. There is no allowance for spaces so that your domain name is one word.The length of the domain name is limited to 26 characters and this includes the extension such as com, edu, org. If you choose a domain name that is already registered to someone else, you will have to choose another one. Domain names are not case sensitive so that using capitals will not add to the uniqueness of your domain name.

You will want to use your creative ability in choosing your domain name and want it to reflect your product or service. You want to be careful that you don’t offend anyone using another language or that it might have a negative connotation. For most small business owners, it will be more effective to choose a domain name that is less generic and more specific to your product or service. Be careful that your domain name is not in violation of trademarks or copyrights.

Success to you in your quest to select the perfect domain name for your business.

With the way the internet is growing these days, it’s no surprise that there are a ton of people that want to own their own website. There are even more people that want to have their own domain name. Having your own can become a bit difficult. There is of course the option to own a sub domain but that will not help most people, because while they have a domain name by using this method, it will never end up at the top of the Google hit list, no matter how many great keywords they use. For those who don’t care about it, that’s great because sub domains are generally free so long as you use the free ones, and they are offered by many different websites. So the question on everyone’s mind these days, is it possible to get absolutely free domain names?

It is possible to obtain a free name that you actually own, but even free comes with a certain price. One of the biggest issues is that you’ll generally end up filling out a lot of different offers. Yes, we’ve all been through this, the scenario where they offer you something for free, and you get excited thinking you’re going to have the newest video game console, or absolutely free domain names in this case, and then they make you answer a bunch of questions. You’re fine with the questions, until you get to the one that requires a paid subscription to some ridiculous magazine in order to proceed. That’s where you end up drawing the line and clicking on the X.

If you do manage to get your own, and somehow manage to get it without giving up any money, then you’ll probably notice that you have to pay for the hosting. Without it, your site will never go live because even though you have your website made, with all of its cute little flash buttons and the like, it’s never going to be live on the internet until you shell out the cash for the hosting. Normally you’ll discover that the company offering the paid hosting is the same company that you got this free domain from. They’re going to get their money no matter what. If you do manage to get free hosting along with absolutely free domain names, then you’ll probably find that your page is littered with advertisements over which you have no control. You might be okay with this at the moment, but later on you’re going to realize that this isn’t the website you had in mind when you went looking for absolutely free domain names.

One more problem you run into, is that if you did not acquire the rights to .com, .org, .net and every other extension under the sun, people will be free to copy your name with a different extension. Say you have rubblecake.com, and someone makes rubblecake.org. This means that others may accidentally navigate to that site instead of yours, costing you both traffic and ratings.

All in all, it’s better to buy your domain name if you are serious about having your own website. It’s better for you, and it’s definitely better for everyone that visits your website on a daily basis.

People these days are making a lot of money sitting at home and without much knowledge about technology and Internet. One such way in which you can make money is from selling domain-names. This home-based business of selling domain-names does not require any skills and hard work. It is just the knack of hitting the right domains and you do not even require a high capital to start this business.

For making money through selling domain names you requires a computer and an Internet connection. Start with searching for the latest trends that people are looking for. Try to buy as many domain names as you think you can easily sell and release them when the right time approaches. It is equally important that you know what the future market would be and look for domain names in that sector also. Hit the domains that are easy to remember and that use the common search words in that particular sector.

You can easily sell a domain name ranging from $150 to $1,500 or more depending on the web market that you have chosen to sell your domain in. The only factor that requires attention when doing the domain selling business is the time dedication. You will have to spend a lot of time in looking for the right domain names so that you can make big profits.

If the domain is fully developed and has a considerable traffic then probably you can sell the domain for more. Also if the domain is SEO then you can get a good price for the same. Starting the domain selling business would require you to devote some time towards proper search so that you can know which domain names to invest in and which would help you make the highest profits.

The method of domain parking has been on the internet now for well over 12 years and is still a very popular method to generate income from domain names if you don’t have time to develop them or have the skills to

Let’s start by looking at how to begin using this simple system.

Ok well going by the methods name you will have to own a few names, once you own a name you can get started. The key to this method is traffic and is it best to find domains that already have a lot of traffic to them or were expired domain names that the owner forgot to renew. The more traffic you have the more this method will wok for you.

The principles are simple when you want to park domain names, you will need to sign up to a company that allows you to do this, I have given a link to a company I use and they work very well for me.

All you do once you have signed up to a company is to place your name on their server; this is done by changing the DNS and takes less than to minutes to do. Don’t worry it does not cost anything to use their servers which is another excellent reason to start out domain parking with the fact that it does not cost much at all.

Once you’re DNS (Domain name server) has resolved you can now make a landing page, this is the page people who visit your site will see, it is important to make sure the content is relevant to your names traffic. So fill it with information and graphics that people are expecting to see.

You will need to choose the keywords of the adverts you want users to see when they visit you site. So make sure again that they are relevant to your domain names traffic. You earn your revenue every time someone clicks on one of these adverts.

This is the basic when you park domain names and I am sure you will pick it up very quickly.