Choosing a Domain Name

The decision on what domain to register for your website is an important one and should be aligned to the goals of your site. The first thing to decide on is whether you expect your visitors to find your website via Google or by word of mouth or other promotional techniques such as offline advertising. Lets think back to the example of “snowboarding clothing” we used in our guide to finding your first affiliate niche to consider the alternatives.

Branded Domains

If we believe our main source of traffic from our website is going to be from branding, then we should try and come up with a catchy domain name such as snowheaven.co.uk – something that is easily memorable and if a user saw your advert in a magazine or in another website, they would be able to directly enter the address in their browser and find your website without a major risk of them forgetting it or mis-spelling it.

Keyword Domains

However, at this stage of your affiliate marketing career, branding is not really going to be a major issue and the majority of your traffic is going to be found via the search engines. Therefore, our research and previous experiments have found that for secondary search phrases such as “snowboarding clothing”, there is a significant advantage from including your keywords in your domain.

Therefore, assuming snowboarding clothing is your main keyword, you should try and register www.snowboardingclothing.co.uk. If this is not available, you could try a different domain extension (.org, etc) or you could try adding a hyphen to get snowboarding-clothing.co.uk.

The impact of including your keyword in your domain is that it tells Google that your site is about Snowboarding Clothing. If the content of your website matches your main keyword (which it will if you follow our advice) then Google will trust your site and give you a lot of extra “points” (of course it’s a lot more sophisticated than that) and you will quickly see your domain rank well for your chosen keyword.

This is the logic behind choosing a niche such as “snowboarding clothing”, rather than attempting to go directly for “snowboarding”. Once you have got good Google rankings for snowboarding clothing, which is fairly easy to do, you will start attracting traffic and also links to your site. This makes it much easier to introduce new sections on your site such as “snowboarding holidays” and rank well for them, as Google trusts your site. So the difference between the failed internet marketer and you is that they go directly for the main keyword, fall well short, lose interest and give up while you will go for it indirectly, build steadily and get there simply by writing valuable content.

Domain Extensions

I have added this section as we have had a lot of emails asking us what domain extension is necessary. The four extensions that I would recommend as being suitable are:

.com
.co.uk
.org
.org.uk

Those are the four that I regularly use, but at a push I would use .net.

If a really great keyword, such as credit cards came up for another domain extension, it might be worth a gamble, but in general I would recommend using the ones above.

If you are developing a website which you will promote all over the world and traffic from USA, Australia and Asia is useful to you, then it would be worthwhile going for the .com to help you attract traffic in all countries. If however your traffic is going to be focused in the UK, then not only is a .co.uk domain significantly cheaper, but there does appear to be an advantage in ranking for .co.uk domains in the UK search results, so I would personally recommend going for that.

.org and .org.uk domains are obviously not as strong as the .com and .co.uk versions but they are certainly worthwhile. Again, my preference is for .org.uk for UK based traffic and I have made very good results with .org.uk domains.

In the above example, my first choice would be to register www.snowboardingclothing.co.uk. However, if this was not available, my second choice would be www.snowboarding-clothing.co.uk, then www.snowboardingclothing.org.uk.

Note that as long as the hyphen correct separates your main keywords, our research does not show any significant negative impact on the results for this keyphrase.

Next: Planning your content for your website