This part of my affiliate guide you will learn how to choose your domain name for your affiliate website. Choosing a good domain name for an affiliate website is fairly easy to do. If you follow this guide to choosing a good domain name you will have no problems.
What is a Domain Name?
A domain name is basically a name for an address. For example if you are sending a letter to someone through regular mail instead of writing the latitude and longitude of the house you write an address. Another example would be instead of even writing a street address you could just write Mom on it and the mail carrier would know where it goes. That is what your domain name is doing. Instead of telling everyone the IP address of your web server (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) you can just tell them domain.com instead of a bunch of numbers.
Before you choose a domain name for your site make sure you have read my guide to Find a Niche Content Idea. Now that you know what your website content topic is going to be, we need to choose a domain name that is relevant to the site’s content.
Choose a Domain Name Relevant to your Site Content
If your building an affiliate website based on woodworking, you would want to find a domain name like woodworking.com although that will probably be taken already, but you get the idea. I like to use GoDaddy to search for a new domain name. The reason I like GoDaddy is if the domain name you are looking for is already taken, GoDaddy will give you some suggestions for a domain name similar to the domain name you searched for. You do not need to use one of the suggested domain names if you don’t like it or if it doesn’t meet the guidelines I’m going to give you in this guide to choosing a domain name. Use the suggested domain names to give you more ideas for a domain name, but again do not use one of them unless you like it.
What Should I Look for in a Domain Name?
The most important thing you’re looking for in a domain name is that it is directly related to your website’s content or niche. You don’t want a domain name fastcars.com if your website is about trucks, boats, or even fishing.
The next highest importance in choosing a website domain is to get a .com domain name. .com domain names are more known, easier to remember, and the search engines seem to like .com domains more. .com is also the first thing that pops into people’s head when trying to remember a domain name.
Next up on the guidelines would be to try and keep your domain name short. The shorter your domain name, the easier to remember and looks better. This is not very important as most of your website traffic, visitors, will be finding your website on a search engine or a link from another site. Which means they will be clicking on your domain name to go to your website and not typing it in.
Spelling is a must! Do not misspell any words in your domain name! I know some people do this on purpose on words that are commonly misspelled, so they can get those people coming to their site instead of the website they were originally trying to go to, but I think that looks very unprofessional and tacky, so don’t misspell any words in your domain name.
Try not to use numbers in your domain name unless it is actually relevant to your site’s content. If you want woodworking.com and the domain is already taken, don’t get woodworking2.com just because that domain is available. This looks unprofessional and tacky.
Where Can I Buy a Domain Name?
You can buy a domain name on GoDaddy, but if this is your first website you still need to purchase a webhost and most webhosts will give you your first domain name for free. So we are just using GoDaddy to help us find a domain name that is available. If you already have a webhost or you’ve already built your first affiliate website then you can buy addition domain names from GoDaddy. After purchasing a domain name from GoDaddy you will need to setup your DNS. Basically this would be telling GoDaddy the address of your webhost. Again this is only needed if you already have a webhost, used your free domain name that came with your webhost, or your webhost doesn’t give you your first domain name for free. Which there are very few webhosts that don’t give you your first domain name for free.
What’s After Choosing a Domain Name?
Only move on if you’ve found a domain name you want to use and GoDaddy says the domain is available to purchase.
Make sure you write down what domain name you are going to use so you don’t forget it. Trust me it’s easy to forget when you have just been running 10 – 20 different domain names to see of they are available. You can leave GoDaddy now and read my affiliate guide on Choosing a Webhost.
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