When it comes to making your online presence professional buying domain name is one of the best things you can do for your online business. With so many free options available online, many people mistakenly think that they will be just as successful (and save money) by going the free route, but there are a few problems with that line of thought.
For one thing, when you are relying on a free blog, no matter which platform you are using, you don’t own a thing. If the service that provides the blog, say WordPress, decides that they don’t like something about your blog, they can shut it down and they don’t have to let you know they are doing it or why they are doing it.
Another problem using the free methods is that you can’t get a good domain name. You want your own unique domain name not a hybrid name tacked on to the end of the free service you’re using, it just looks more professional to have your own name.
Domain names are inexpensive and easy to buy so there’s really no reason to not buy your own. With sites like GoDaddy.com and Domains.AskAlanFeldman.com plus many more, you can get a domain name for as cheap as $10 a year or if you buy many at once you can get the price down to less than $7 a piece per year.
Besides establishing your online presence and creating a professional look, when you buy your own domain name you can actually flip your website and sell it. It’s the same concept as when someone buys a house, fixes it up and sells it for a profit. There are sites online that will allow you to place your site up for sale, Flippa.com is one of those sites.
Just buy a good domain name, put up a site, get some traffic (and hopefully some sales) than list it on Flippa and make some money. Think about it, if you only paid $10 for a domain name and a little bit for hosting, and then you sold the site for only $200 that would be a pretty nice profit for such a quick and easy sale.
When it comes time to picking out your domain name there is a few simple things to keep in mind:
1. Do keyword research to find a list of keywords associated with your niche that get a lot of traffic every month. Then try to get one of those keywords, exactly, as your domain name. For example, in the niche for cat toys let’s say I found a great keyword that gets a lot of monthly searches without too much competition: cheap cat toys. Than I would want to use that as my domain: CheapCatToys.com. That way my domain name is a highly searched for keyword which will guarantee quite a bit of free, highly targeted, traffic.
2. If all of your marketing efforts are going to be online I wouldn’t worry too much about the extension. I’ve had equally good luck using a .com, .net, or .org. All my marketing efforts are with PPC or article marketing so no one needs to type in my domain name, they just click on a link which is why I don’t think the extensions matter too much. If you are going to be marketing in such a way that people would have to actually type in the domain name to find your site, it may make more of a difference.
Treat your online business like a business and establish your online presence and professionalism by buying domain name. The cheap route can work in a pinch but as soon as you can afford $10 or so, buy your own name.
