Now we’re at one of the most exciting steps of making your blog – choosing your blog domain name!
A domain name is the web address, or URL, of your new blog – just like the domain name of this site is www.20minuteblog.com. Unless you are a nonprofit, I recommend that you get a domain name that ends in .com or .net. You probably do not want to use one of the new .biz, .us, etc. Of course .org is a perfectly valid choice if you are a nonprofit.
The domain name that you want may not be available. Not only are there a lot of websites out there these days, but there are also companies that buy up tons of domain names in hopes that they can get a legitimate business to offer them an outrageous amount of money for them. Fortunately they can’t buy them all, and by going through some variants of your domain name it shouldn’t be too hard to find one that’s available.
How to Check Domain Availability
Hostmonster offers an excellent free service to verify whether a domain name is available or not. Just go Here and type your domain name in the field to automatically check if it’s available or if it’s already registered. If the domain name you want is already registered it will automatically tell you if a different extension, such as .net, is available instead.
In a perfect world you want your domain name to be three words or less – this makes it easy for people to remember. However be aware that very few single word domain names are still available these days. If your ideal domain is already registered by someone else, trying putting “the” in front of it, or slight variations on the wording, or changing the word order. For example this site could just as easily have been The20MinuteBlog.com or BlogIn20Minutes.com and would be just as easy to remember. With a little experimentation you can usually get a domain name very close to what you want.
4 Responses
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Good luck finding your domain name – it seems like everything is taken these days. Didn’t try adding the in front though. Good tip.
September 21st, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I checked my domain name that I wanted and it wasn’t avaialble, but then I put the in front of it and I was able to get it! Good tip.
April 5th, 2010 at 7:42 am
Most of the good onesare gone.
June 5th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Just a thought… I’ve used Google’s Keyword Tool to help me find really good keywords for my domain names. If one knows what is being searched for, creating a domain name that’s botch catchy AND relevant is a lot easier.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?forceLegacy=true
Enjoy!
Leave a Comment