Once you’ve found a niche to target and are confident you can compete in that market, the next step is to find an appropriate domain name. In order to do this, we must visit a website that’s in the business of registering domains on behalf of its customers. There are a multitude of sites that serve the function and they are all nearly identical. Registering a domain is a short process that comes with a $8-9 a year fee. The service we at SiteBasics101 are most familiar with and recommend to beginners is namecheap which has a homepage that should look something like this:
Use the search box towards top left to enter your targeted phrase, for example earlgreytea and hit enter.
Consider yourself lucky if the ‘.com’ is available for your word as it is the most common and well known extension. Fortunately, this guide is mainly interested in building sites which perform well on search engines so an easy to remember domain name is not a necessity (though it certainly won’t hurt!) The domain name YOU want should be your the KEYWORD your’re trying to rank for. If your site is about ‘how to bake cookies’, your domain name should be ‘howtobakecookies.com/.net/.org’ or even ‘how-to-bake-cookies.com/.net/.org’ Both .net and .org are acceptable alternative TLDs (Top Level Domains) that are given the same weight as .com on search engines. Avoid other extensions like .biz or .tv, however. If you still can’t find a decent domain name, try using dashes like this: earl-grey-tea.com/.net/.org. It won’t be pretty but search engines will still read it as ‘earl grey tea’ so you’re still safe. Eventually we ended up with earl-grey-tea.org for our example site that accompanies this guide. The site you end up creating by following this guide will look a lot like Earl-grey-tea.org but will have different content on it. Don’t let the site’s ugly look scare you way, Earl-grey-tea is a PROFITABLE website that makes a good $5 a day, which means the site is worth $1500! Keep in mind that purchasing a domain name will require registering with the site and in order to finish the purchase you will need a credit card or a paypal account to complete the purchase. What to do after the purchase is discussed in the next part of the guide.
