Choosing Domain Name.
In the physical world, you can distinguish a business because of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can tell that a bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a clothing store. In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story altogether.
Choosing domain name is the key. Your domain name is the only clue to your online business. You do not have visual clues: no location, no look, and no store design. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of words to reach your site.
Your prospective visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about until she finds it and reads its contents. Who can ever tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search engine?
Choosing domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A good domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can make your business stand out in the crowd, or just float aimlessly in space.
The need to provide immediate clues to an online business led to the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names instantly provide the user with an idea of what a business is all about, what to expect and look for in a site.
For instance, Etoys.com is a toy store. The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful; that some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to get the name they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com were both bought for $3 million each.
Telephone.com was acquired for $1.75 million, while Bingo.com sold for $1.1 million. However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz” that you’d like surrounding your website.
Branding has always been about proper names: McDonald’s did not name their store Hamburger. Hertz is not called Car Rental. FedEx is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is not Photographs. Google is not Search Engine. Microsoft is not Computer Software.
For better branding results, choosing domain name should stand out and be easy to remember.
Consider the following tips when choosing domain name:
The domain name should be short.
The domain name should be simple.
It should be suggestive of your business category.
It should be unique.
It should be easy to interpret and pronounce.
It should be personalized.
It should not be difficult to spell.
It should not be difficult to remember.
Domain names can be registered through many different companies (known as “registrars”) – a listing of these companies is available at ICANN.org. You can register for domain names from 1 to 10 years in advance and prices can vary anywhere from $8 to $30 per year for each registered domain.
Most website hosting companies, as explained later, will handle the registration process for you, but make sure that you are properly listed as the owner of the domain when it is registered.
If you have registered a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew it in time. You’d be surprised at the number of cases, where website owners have lost their domain name to a competitor by not renewing it in time.
Using Expired Domains to Skyrocket Your Traffic:
Domain names provide a great opportunity to make easy money. I’m not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up good names and sell them on for a profit. If you didn’t get positioned in that market early on, you can forget about it.
The bottom’s fallen out of the market and the best domains are long gone. I’m talking about expiring domains. Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to promote their site and build up traffic.
Many of them then lose interest and move on, leaving their site active. That means that although they still own the domain, they’re not actively promoting it. But they don’t need to. All the automatic marketing systems they’ve put in place are still bringing in traffic. The site runs itself.
Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the market, you’ve got a pre-built stream of customers.
You can either rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to your domain. It’s that easy. In fact, websites like DeletedDomains.com actually do all the legwork and let you reap all the rewards. Do be careful when using other sites though.
There are some swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions, provide you with outdated lists, take your money and keep the good domains for themselves. It happens, and there’s little point in taking a risk with other companies when DeletedDomains.com does such a great job.
The Host:
Let’s start where the Internet starts: with a host. A host is a server that provides a home for your website on the World Wide Web. Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host contains all the files needed to run your website.
Why can’t you just keep all those files on your own computer? Because that would mean visitors would have to connect directly to your computer to see your website and that’s not a good idea.
It wouldn’t be secure and it would make your machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can simply upload everything you need to the server and your users can then connect there to see your site.
It lets the site run faster and allows it to have all the security and extras it needs. Selecting a host is the first important step towards building your Internet business.
Hosting services and companies vary from totally free, shared servers to large-scale dedicated machines. You’ll have to decide which is right for you and your business.
Your choice of server will depend on how much money you have available at the beginning and how much you plan to grow in the future.
In my opinion, for commercial sites, free hosting is a waste of time. Your users are going to get blasted with annoying pop-ups every time they surf to your page, it’s going to be impossible to get a decent position in a search engine, and you don’t even get a real business URL.
No one’s going to remember your web address if they have to type:
FreeWebsiteHosting.com/my_site. However, it is possible to choose a cheaper host at the beginning and move up as your business begins to bring in money. NOTE: One of the most important factors in choosing a website host is the customer service you receive once you’ve signed up.
There are many technical issues that can come up once you have your own website, and if you don’t have a truly dedicated hosting company to support you and help you resolve these issues when necessary, you could, quite simply, lose your business.
Trust me, I’ve seen many thriving online businesses fall apart because they chose the wrong hosting company. When hosting is cheap, there is a reason for it. With website hosting, you get exactly what you pay for and you should never compromise when it comes to who to host your website with. Click here to learn about my service and the website hosting company I highly recommend to everyone who does business online.
Next:
Testing and Performance You have designed a very usable website, you have hosted it using a very reliable web hosting company, and you have integrated a safe and trusted payment processing system with your website. However, all these can prove to be useless until you know your site is actually working and accessible. If you want to create an accessible website, you will need to test, test and test again.