All you need to know to choose a domain name

All you need to know to choose a domain name

When you decided your business! The next step is to find a good location for your business, right? In fact, choosing a right location is as vital as choosing what to sell and how much to sell. It will impacts on the traffic to your business. For example, you want to sell cosmetics and now you have to choose a location for your cosmetics business, there are 3 options: 1) a high traffic location in a trade center or a shopping mall, 2) on a main street of a central district, or 3) a place in low traffic area. In fact, these 3 options are feasible. However, based on your choice, there are 2 things to consider: 1) the cost for location and 2) marketing effort to get customers. So, how to choose a domain name which brings you profit is very important for you to do online business like choosing the right location in traditional business.

In the internet world, finding a location means to create an address on the internet and opening a store means to open a website.

Similar to traditional business, you need an address for your office, here in the internet, you need to register an online address, called domain name for your business. Domain name (or url) is very important because it impacts on the ranking of your website on search engine like Google or Bing and help customers know and find your business more easily. Although Google already announced not to rank websites based on their domain name, it still has a specific impact.

After choosing a niche at the previous step, now at this step, you need to find a specific “forgot” market, related to your chosen niche. For example, the mass market is "health care products", the niche can be “method of treating eczema”.

 You have 3 tasks to do before you can choose an effective domain name:

1. To find a specific profitable niche

2. To ensure search quantity in order to generate profit.

3. To define unmet needs.

All you need to know to choose a domain name

1. To find a specific profitable niche:

If you choose the market "health", you need to choose more specific or narrow one. For example, you can choose “methods to treat eczema”, "ways to treat acne", "yoga", etc

You don’t need to worry that the niche market is too small because internet market is a global market with over 1 billion people, and the quantity of internet users are increasing more and more.

2. To ensure search quantity in order to generate profit.

If you choose a specific niche without customers, you still die. The most popular failure in business is to choose a niche with so insufficient need.

Hence, you need to ensure your niche market with at least 10,000 searches a month in order to make profit. Why? Because with that quantity of searches as 100%, through purchase funnel as below, the real quantity of possible customers are just around 3-5%. It means that with 10,000 searches, the real quantity of customers are about 300 people. If you sell a product with the price of 9 USD, with that search quantity, you can earn 2,700USD/month.

Page https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner will give you the idea of monthly local search quantity and global search quantity. You will get the information as below:

3. To define unmet needs.

Now you knew a specific market which is big enough to make profit out there. The next step is to find customer problems to solve. Customers only pay when you help them to solve their problems. You can find customer problems by joining forums related to your business, observe what they say? What they need? You can also look at what your competitors do? How they introduce their products?

Ok, done! You can choose an effective domain name based on the 3 elements above. Now come to the crucial moment, push on BUY button to buy the domain you chose and start your business.

There are many prestige service provider for domain in the world. If you don’t want to spend your time on website design, you should buy both domain and hosting and order website building service for you. You can buy Domain and Hosting in Godaddy, Hostgator, etc. If you use free popular platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress, Wix,... you even don’t need to buy hosting. You only decide to choose the service provider and buy domain.

There are many big domain providers such as Godaddy, Host Gator, Arvix, InMotion Hosting,...However, based on pricing, utility, service, and interface, I often choose Godaddy. In addition, Godaddy frequently offers promotions for customers.

The cost is around from 2.99 USD to 12 USD. Several good domains which were already bought by others can cost over thousands USD.

2 minor cautions to choose an effective domain:

Caution 1: What tail to choose?

There are choices for you including *.com, *.info, *.org, *.net, *.us, *.com.vn,... The first-year cost can be different. For example, *.info tail often is 3.99 USD, *.net is 6.99 USD, *.com tail is the one which rarely has promotion. So what should you choose? It is similar to the action of choosing high traffic location and low traffic location in traditional business, high traffic location type 1 or type 2. The tail of *.com is the most popular and used for trading or business purpose. When people don’t use search engine to find the information they need, they have a habit of typing *.com. How popular do you look at this type of tail? The tail of *.org is often used for organizations, the tail of *.info is used for people or organization, the tail of *.net is often used for business related to online.

In my opinion, don’t save some dollar for the first-year cost and make your domain less effective. The tail of *.com is first priority. In case that *.com is not available, you consider other options.

Caution 2: How long to buy?

In general, people often make saving and are not sure with their decision, they have a habit of buying 1 year. However, I recommend you to buy at least 2 years because of 4reasons: 1) Service providers will evaluate and give you more priorities because you are serious in your business, 2) The annual cost is around 12USD/year, if you buy 2 years, you only pay 24USD. It is still much cheaper than renting a business location in traditional business, 3) the next-year fee can increase based on supply and demand, inflation, etc…, 4) you have more determine on your business, and 5) don’t need to pay attention to when you need to make a next payment.

Ok ok, now you can press on BUY button to get a real domain.

Best regards

Ryan Holmes