Are you thinking about starting a blog? Now that you have decided on a niche, let’s think about what domain name you should choose.
If you haven’t decided on a niche, check out this article: 7 Most profitable blogging niches for 2022
Table of Contents
What is a domain name in blogging?
A domain name is the address of your blog. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the name of your blog although for most people, their domain name is the name of their blog.
www.HelloMoneyTree.com is the domain name for this personal finance blog. And the name of this blog is HelloMoneyTree
Does capitalization matter when selecting a domain name?
No, you can capitalize any letter when selecting a domain name but it doesn’t really matter when registering for a domain name.
www.HelloMoneyTree.com is the same as www.hellomoneytree.com
Where do I sign up for a domain name?
You can sign up for a domain name at several places. If you go to www.dominr.com and type in the domain name you want, you’ll be able to select from a list of places to get your domain name from.
I recommend buying your domain at Namecheap as it offers free WHOIS protection.
What is WHOIS?
When you sign up for a domain name, your information (name, home address, email address, phone number) will be available to the public on the WHOIS database. You need to pay for the WHOIS guard to conceal it.
It typically costs less than $25 per year for a WHOIS guard.
What happens if I don’t pay for WHOIS?
If you don’t pay for WHOIS, your information will be open to the public and you’ll receive a lot of spam emails from people who desperately want to sell their programming and advertising service.
You may also put yourself in danger as your whole address will be available for the world to see. If you’re unlucky enough, some solicitors may show up at your door frustrated that you turned down their service in an email.
How much does a domain name cost?
A domain name usually costs $9.99 to $24.99 a year. Sometimes when you buy from a hosting company, they’ll give you a free one-year domain with the purchase of one year of hosting.
How much does it cost to renew a domain name?
You’ll have to renew your domain before it expires. You can buy a few years’ worths of the domain at a time so that you don’t have to keep on renewing it every year.
It typically costs $14.99 to $24.99 for each year for domain renewal. Each company may have a different price for domain renewal.
What if I forgot to renew my domain name before it expires?
If you forgot to renew your domain name before it expires, your website will be blank with simple texts asking you to contact the company you bought your domain name from.
You usually have a grace period of about 30 days to pay for the domain name again plus an additional fee to revive your domain for not renewing it on time. This penalty fee is usually less than $50 although sometimes they may waive the fee if it’s your first offense.
How many years should I buy my domain name for?
When you buy your domain name, it’ll ask you how many years you want to buy your domain name for. Usually, the more years you selected, the less you pay for each year.
Google likes it when the domain name is reserved for at least 3 years because it tells Google that you plan on keeping the domain name for some time so it’s safe to grant searches to your website.
If you’re just starting out and you don’t know whether you want to continue doing this a year from now, it’s best to only reserve your domain name for a year.
Most people buy their domain name for between 1–3 years. Don’t reserve your domain name for 10 years because you never know what will happen during that 10 years span. You may realize that the niche you’re in makes you money, you may decide to pursue something else instead, you may grow bored with blogging, you may realize that there’s a spelling mistake with your domain name, etc.
Can I get a refund on my domain name if I change my mind?
If you don’t like your domain name or you changed your mind, you can usually get a refund within a week to thirty days from the day you purchased your domain name.
Each company has its own refund policy so you’ll have to consult the company you bought the domain name from to see whether getting a refund is a possibility.
How do I select the best domain name for my blog?
Selecting the right domain name for your blog can be an important start to your blogging career.
Although, you shouldn’t worry too much about finding the perfect domain name for your blog. Take, for instance, www.avocadu.com is an extremely successful blog in the fitness niche and its domain name isn’t even a real word. It’s just avocado spelled wrong.
Don’t spend too much time choosing your domain name because there are more important things you need to do if you want to make money blogging. That said, there are some things you must note when selecting a domain name for your blog. Read the following carefully.
1. Make sure your domain name ends with .com
I know it can be tempting to try something different from what everyone is doing with the extension but the best extension is .com not anything else.
What is an extension? It’s what your domain name ends on. For instance, if your domain name is HelloMoneyTree and your extension is .com, the address to your blog would be www.hellomoneytree.com and if your extension is .org your blog address would be www.hellomoneytree.org
Having your blog address ends in .com makes it look more credible and trustworthy.
Most people when remembering a website they visited typically type in .com in the end because that’s what most websites end on. If your blog ends with .org, .net, .ninja, or .blog it’ll be pretty difficult for people to remember it and you may lose some traffic.
Most smartphone keyboards also end with .com so if your blog ends in .com, you increase the chance of someone going to the right website when typing in the search bar.
2. Make sure your domain name is less than 15 characters long
The longer your domain name is, the harder it is for people to remember and the easier it is for people to mistype. Most people don’t want to retype a domain name if the website isn’t coming up on the first try. You should make your audience’s experience as comfortable as possible with an easy-to-remember short domain name.
3. Your domain name should be easy to pronounce and spell
If your domain name is hard to pronounce, it’ll be hard for people to remember it. They’ll see a great article and don’t remember the domain name because it’ll all be a jumble of characters to them.
If your domain name is easy to spell, it increases the chance of people revisiting your blog or visiting your blog after hearing someone talking about your blog.
4. Don’t use hyphens in your domain name
Hyphens in the domain name make it look unprofessional. In fact, it reminds people of spam websites. Lots of spam websites have hyphens in their domain name so don’t add them to your website.
The reason people have hyphens in their domain name is that the domain name they want without hyphens is already taken. Your audience may forget to type in the hyphen and ends up at your competitor’s site instead.
For these reasons, avoid hyphens in your domain name.
5. Don’t use double letters in your domain name
What is a double letters domain name? Well, www.stressslayer.com is an example in which there are many same letters appearing consecutively in the domain name. The domain name can cause many people to mistype when typing in the search bar. They’ll either end up at someone else’s site or they’ll not find what they’re looking for and you’d lose potential traffic.
6. Be careful with using numbers in your domain name
Why must you be careful with numbers in your domain name? Well, www.1EmilyFoodie.com sounds just like www.OneEmilyFoodie.com. People may type in the wrong address in the search bar because they forgot whether it was a ‘1’ or a ‘one’.
Does that mean you should stay away from putting numbers in your domain name entirely? Well, no. Say, your domain name is www.22EmilyFoodie.com people won’t tend to misremember that as “twentytwoemilyfoodie.com” as that would be a whole lot more to type and they surely would remember the fact that the website they visited had a weirdly long and confusing domain name.
However, just note that someone who heard the address of your domain name instead of seeing it may mistake that you meant “twentytwoemilyfoofie” instead of “22emilyfoodie”.
7. Your domain name should be unique
If www.amazon.com was called www.buybookshere.com. It wouldn’t be very unique because that could have been any other website that sells books.
You should try to make sure your domain name is unique and brandable. When someone hears the name of your domain, they remember the color theme, the blog theme, what the blog stands for, what you blog about, etc.
8. Do a search on social media to see if someone else already owns the username
Sometimes someone may already have an established presence on the internet with the same name that you want your domain name to be on. It’s just much better when all your usernames are consistent with your domain name as it makes your brand looks more collected.
It can be difficult to find a domain name that is also available as a username on other social media sites like Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. One trick is to add a hard-to-spell number in Arabic letters at the front. For example, 77EmilyTravel.com would be hard to be mistaken as seventysevenemilytravel.com as that would be pretty hard to spell and much too long. Most people don’t have numbers as the first few letters in the username so you can find a domain name you want this way.
9. Don’t make your domain name too specific so you have room to grow
Let’s say you want to start a blog on the vegan niche for kids and you want your domain name to be www.veganforkids.com.
The problem with this domain is that later on, if you want to blog about veganism for anyone other than kids or if you want to explore other food niches, it’ll be pretty hard for people to associate those new topics with you so you may limit yourself too much with the domain name there.
When choosing a domain name, make sure it’s not too specific to leave you with room to explore as you grow your brand.
10. Act quickly before someone else buys the domain name
Most of the time, people won’t snatch up the username you want because that would be quite coincidental but if you found a good domain name, try to reserve (buy) it as soon as you can to prevent losing it to someone else.
11. Use your own name for your domain name
Something a lot of people do is that they would use their own name as the name of their domain name and thus they could blog about anything.
If your name is short and easy to remember, this may be a good option.
Just know that sometimes it’s easier to remember www.amazon.com than www.jeffbezos.com when you aren’t well known yet.
12. Use a domain name generator
If you really can’t come up with a domain name, you can always try a domain name generator.
A good domain name generator is NameBoy but there are other good ones out there you can find with a simple Google search.
Afterthought
Choosing a domain name can seem like a daunting task but it’s not really that scary. The truth is that the content you put out is much more important than your domain name. Of course, having a bad domain name can get you off to a bad start.
Don’t dwell too much in this phase so you can get started with everything else. In fact, I came up with the name of this blog about 20 seconds after I decided to start a personal finance blog. Sometimes your best idea is the first few ideas your subconscious send to you the moment you decide to pursue something.
Let’s get started
After hearing all that, what are you waiting for? If you haven’t started your blog yet, I suggest buying hosting from BlueHost. BlueHost is an industry expert and the best hosting company out there. Click this link to sign-up (affiliate link).
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