Finding A Domain Name

One of the more common things you will do as an Internet marketer is to look for domain names to register. Finding domain names is not so much as tough a task as deciding on what kind of domain name you're looking for. In this article, we're going to briefly touch on each topic as you really can't have one without the other. Hopefully, you will find these few tips helpful.

Finding a domain name is actually the easy part. There are a multitude of places on line where you can search to see if a domain is available. One of the most popular is whois.com. The site is very simple, though at times I find it painfully slow to load. Maybe that's because of its incredible popularity. Its current Alexa rank is 7,991. That's not too shabby for a site where all you're doing is looking up domain names to see if they're available.

The one thing you have to be careful of when searching for domain names, and this applies not only to whois.com but to any site where you look up domain names, is that the way their search features are configured, you MUST leave out the www and the com from the search. So, for example, if you are looking up to see if www.mynewsite.com is registered or available, you would only type in mynewsite. Some services only allow you to look up com domains while others will have drop down boxes that allow you to choose com, net, org or whatever. This will vary from site to site.

If the domain name is available, you'll get a message saying that it is. If it isn't, then you'll get a message stating this and asking you if you want to do a lookup to see who owns the domain. If this is a domain that you really want, you can contact the person and see if they are willing to sell. Some domain lookup sites, such as GoDaddy, will give you the option of paying a fee to reserve this domain should it become available in the future. They even have a service where they will actively try to purchase the domain for you. The fees vary but most are in the $10 to $20 range.

As I said, finding a domain name is not hard. The hard part is thinking of one that is going to catch people's attention. There are two ways to go about this. One is the keyword method, where you look for a domain name that is keyword rich for the niche that you're targeting. So let's say that you want to put up a site for people who are looking to stop smoking. You might come up with www.stopsmoking.com, which I am quite sure is probably taken considering how keyword rich it is. The other method of choosing a domain name is to go with branding, such as what sites like Yahoo and Google do. Their names have nothing to do with what they are, but everybody knows them. Branding is tougher to pull off because you really nee a catchy name and do a lot of marketing.

Finding a domain name is really not hard. Finding a good one, now THAT is the challenge.

To YOUR Success