Choosing A Domain Name For Your Blog

When you first start blogging, you may begin with a free blog platform like Blogger but as you become serious with blogging, you may want to move your blog to a good host and get a good domain name (which I highly recommend).

Once you decide to buy a domain name you will need to find one that is not registered yet, which is not easy as most of the domains you can think of may have already been taken.

To save time you can use these services:

Instant Domain Search - checks the availability of a .com, .net and .org domain as you type
AJAXWhois - checks the availability of a domain for your preferred extensions as you type
Domjax - free domain name search tool
DomainsBot - suggests available domains
Nameboy - domain name generator
MakeWords - domain name generator
Dyyo - helps you find 4 letter domain names
5Letter - helps you find 5 letter domain names
Whois Source - lets you know if a domain is already registered and displays the details of the registration

Choosing a domain name

I personally prefer choosing domain names that are short, easy to remember and with keywords in it that describes what the site is about. But there are sites with domain names that give you no idea what the site is about and yet are very popular (like Orkut, YouTube,Pownce,etc).

I don’t recommend domains with hyphens and numbers in it (my mistake with Blogg-Buzz) as they make it hard to remember and to tell someone about it.

Also try to always choose a .com domain as that is the most popular and people will mostly assume your domain name to be yourblogname.com, even though it may actually be yourblogname.net and as a result you will lose visitors.

If you plan to start a personal blog, a domain name with your name in it would be the best option but be careful if you have long names. Like for example my name is not really JohnTP, its John T Puthenmadhom and if I had chosen www.johntputhenmadhom.com for this blog I would never have had as many repeat visitors as I currently get as visitors would find it hard to spell my name. So instead I chose johntp.com which is a shorter and easy to remember domain name.

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Posted on October 23rd, 2007 | Category: Blogging |

13 responses so far, Leave a comment

Bloddard

October 24, 2007 at 5:02 am

Great Tip. Thanks….

Keith Dsouza

October 24, 2007 at 10:00 am

Quite true, I too did a mistake of having a hyphen in my domain which eventually loses me a lot of users.

But the services that you listed are good way of finding new domains, but to be frank most of the tech domains are already taken and people tend to add any random word to the tech keyword to get a blog.

I have seen many wierd domains which contain *tech* but are meaningless.

So users should choose meaningful names it does not necessarily have to have a tech word in it, if its related to tech, for example lifehacker, cybernet etc are very good examples of tech domains which do no have tech in it.

JohnTP

October 24, 2007 at 11:13 pm

What drives me nuts is that most of the time I decide on a domain name, I find it to be already taken. A domain I once chose was taken within a week and another one I chose was taken just one hour before I was going to register it.