Tips on registering your own domain name

To register a Domain will cost you a yearly registration fee. The amount of the fee depends on where you register the Domain name you want and what type of Domain name extension you want. For example, a dot com (.com) extension is usually cheaper than a .info or .ws extension.

Usually, the place where you register your Domain name will give you a password protected member area to administer various tasks associated with owning a Domain name. What this means to you is that you control your own Domain name, not somebody else who registers your domain name for you.

Where To Go

Here is a few places where you can go to search for and register a Domain name.

* www.mydomain.com
* www.buydomains.com
* www.itsyourdomain.com
* www.domainsearch.com

Compare

Compare the different prices and features you want with your account. Test their customer support. You can usually test customer support by sending an email with a question you may have. If the reply takes too long, you might start getting worried.

Examples:

If your business is Online Dating, online-dating.com would be a good Domain name because Online Dating is a heavily searched term and the dash between online and dating makes it a bit easier to read.

Another example: If you are making a website about Free Paid Surveys, free-paid-surveys.com would be a good domain because it is a bit easier to read than freepaidsurveys.com.

On the other hand, dashed-domains are hard to explain to humans. For example, you tell your friends to visit your site work-at-home-paid-survey.com. How do you actually say that? work dash at dash home dash paid dash survey dot com?

The conclusion about this is - Do the fine math. Dashed domains will make it difficult for people to spread the word about your site but will make it easier for people to click on your search engine listings.

Expired Domain Names

There is many thousands of expired Domain names. For some reason their owner has let the name expire. There is a Free service which allows you to search for expired Domains. If you are lucky, you might be able to snap up a name that is listed on Dmoz or Yahoo. This could mean instant traffic to your site with almost no effort.