Newbies guide to grabbing an address on the Internet – Your very own domain name.

As the title of this post suggest, it’s time to discuss domain names. While this may not be of interest to people who have been on the net for a while, or who are already Internet Marketers, it will be of use to people new to the game, so let’s proceed.

Just like your house has a physical address that is unique to you, you need an address on the Internet for people to find you, and for that you need a web site.

Many ISP’s offer a free web site to their customers, and this can be a useful way to get started.

For instance, I used to operate an ISP years ago at www.newave.net.au and all customers were able to specify their own address doe a web site that ultimately was connected to the main one.

For example one user had a username of readymix, so his web site address was www.newave.net.au/members/readymix.

Now this is all fine for an initial startup, but what happens if you have printed all your letterheads, and business cards with that web site address on it, and then you decide to change ISP’s, and you need to change your website address? It’s off to the printers again for a new batch of business card and letterheads, and you would also have to notify all your existing customers and suppliers of your new website address.

Worse still, if your website was listed in the search engines, then anyone trying to click your website would get an error, for all intensive purposes, you would not exist! Not a desirable situation is it?

Thankfully there is another option, and that is purchasing your very own domain name.

Unlike the free ISP website, a domain remains the same and never changes, so you can print your business cards and letterheads in confidence knowing this.

Now getting your own domain is a relatively simple process.

The first thing you want to decide is what type of domain extension you are after.

A domain extension is the last part of the domain name from the last dot onwards. E.g. With my domain timbuchalka.com the extension is .com

The .com extension is a very common one, easily the most used one on the Internet, and I would recommend you stick to that. However you do have a choice of choosing other extensions, for example in Australia, there is a .com.au extension, in Singapore there is .com.sg, and China has .com.cn

Each country may have specific eligibility rules about domain names, so you would need to check specifically with registers for the rules if you decide to register a domain for a specific country.

The standard .com domain generally has no rules; pretty well anyone can register one.

One thing you should be wary of is trademark infringement, if you go and try to register www.mcdonalds.com (or something with the word mcdonalds in the domain name) you may find McDonalds (the burger people) chasing you for using their name. There is an independent organization that looks after these type of disputes, but generally from what I have read and seen they side with the “big guy” particularly if they have a registered trademark.

There are literally millions of .com domains registered, so most of the one-word domain names have been taken. Generally you need to be a bit inventive (or in my case have an unusual surname, which makes it pretty easy to grab the domain you want e.g. buchalka.com and timbuchalka.com).

There are many, many places to register domain names, I personally use www.namecheap.com but another good place to register domains is www.godaddy.com

You will also need to decide how long to register your domain for (generally you get a discount if you pre-pay for a number of years at a time, rather than just paying for a year at a time).

In addition there are buy and sell websites available where you can pay for a domain name, perhaps with a name you were after. These days, domains are big business, and in fact there are some people making a nice living buying and selling websites).

Now we need to discuss web hosting next, because registering a domain name does just that, a registration. To actually use the domain name requires you to place or “host” the domain name with a site on the Internet. That site (commonly referred to as a web host) allows your website to be “seen” on the Internet (note that they don’t put your domain name into a search engine for you, I will discuss how to do this in a future article).

Now if you do any shopping around, you will find web hosting companies who will also offer you to register a domain with them as a package deal.

I recommend you do not do this! If, for any reason you decide to move to another web host, they can “hold you hostage” because they control your domain. Whilst it’s likely that you will be able to move your domain, it may well be a drawn out and/or an expensive process. Of course not all web hosts would do this, but I believe it’s not worth risking it. You also need to consider what happens if the web host went out of business.

My recommendation is to register a domain with a domain register such as namecheap or godaddy. Then go out and find a web host, and once you have, it’s a relatively simple process to “point” your domain name to the new web host. If you ever decide to move to another web host, you simply “point” your domain to the new web host, simple and it means you retain control.

Now I am not suggesting that the above two places are the only places to register domains, there are hundreds of places to get register domains, but in my experience these two are competitively priced and are reputable.

When researching for web hosts, you will find literally thousands of options (and indeed godaddy offer web hosting, although personally I don’t recommend you use them for this purpose). You will find it’s a case of you get what you pay for, if a deal seems to good to be true, it probably should be avoided.

Two web hosts I have had good experience with are www.dreamhost.com and www.kiosk.ws . But again there are hundreds of options for you out there.

I hope this introductory article has been a good introduction to domain names. Hopefully I have not bored to many of the seasoned marketers out there, for them, it is probably a case of ho hum, I will certainly be getting into more detail and more complex subjects in future posts.

Please post your comments below, and I would particularly appreciate you passing on details of my website to anyone you think would benefit from the information, the more people I can help, the better, after all my mission here is give all the information I know to the readers of this blog, to give them the power to be a success on the Internet, as I have been lucky enough to achieve.

Oh, and one last thing, there are no affiliate links here guys, just real useful information. This is not about me trying to make a buck pushing a particular companies products, it's all about helping others.

Cheers

Tim