Making Money With a Blog - How to Choose a Domain Name

By David E Morgan

This is how to choose a domain name to help you with making money from your blog or website.

First, and most importantly, you need to choose a topic for your website. Pick a niche you know something about, and you won't mind working a few hours a week on indefinitely. Most websites fail because people simply lose interest and stop working on them.

There are two good ways to find domain names. First, the most effective, requires paid tools. This article, however, will outline free tools you can use to find a great domain.

Choosing a Domain Name: A Free Method

1. Go to the Google AdWords external keyword tool. You can simply search Google for "keyword" and it comes right up in the search results.

2. Search for a keyword you are interested in building a site about.

3. Under 'columns' add the estimated cost per click, so you can see what people are paying for their ads to appear for different keywords. Instead of viewing results by 'relevancy' you can also choose to see keywords listed based on global search volume.

4. Open another tab in your browser and search Google for the keywords that interest you. Look for keywords that have under a million results. Under half a million, even better. Under 100,000, super. But again, you want to make sure there will be enough searches that will bring traffic to your site, otherwise you will make no money.

5. There are a number of browser addons you can use, especially in Firefox, to see the Google PageRank and Alexa score of sites that appear in the search results. If all of the listings on pages one and two have high PageRank and low Alexa score, you will be better off picking a different keyword to target. If, however, you see listings for articles on sites like EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, or on blogs at WordPress.com, blogger.com, lenses on Squidoo or HubPages, you can likely compete for that keyword.

6. Once you have a list of possible keywords, go to a free domain name suggestion tool. There are several such sites that you will find with a web search. Search for available domain names using your keywords. Ideally you want a domain name with the exact keywords, without hyphenation, and only with.com,.org, or.net top level domain extensions.

7. By now you have narrowed your list of possibilities for your new domain name. Go back to the AdWords keyword tool and search for more long-tail keywords related to your main keyword. These will be the topics of pages and categories in your website or blog. Again, use a Google search to find out if these keywords have low numbers of results.

8. As mentioned before, the AdWords keyword tool will show you what people are bidding on pay per click advertising for these keywords. Ideally, your new site will have a balance of high and low cost keywords. The high cost keywords will be used for pages you will monetize with AdSense. The low cost keywords you can use for your own PPC advertising. These low-cost keywords will be especially useful for landing pages should you promote an affiliate product from Clickbank, if you create your own products to sell, or if you want to have an advertising campaign to get people to sign up for your newsletter.

9. The next thing to consider before registering a domain name is how exactly you will monetize your site. Selling your own products is always the best way to go, but you can make plenty of money without your own products. Look on ClickBank for products related to your niche that have high gravity, nice sales pages, and newsletter opt-ins. Also look on eBay and Amazon for physical products that are available. Search the web for additional affiliate programs. If there are multi-tier affiliate programs available with repeating commissions for memberships or repeated sales, you are even more likely to turn a profit from your new site.

10. Now go for it, register your domain name on your registrar of choice.

Why Register Exact Keyword Domains?

By registering domain names that match keyword searches exactly, you will get a boost in the search engines from the very start - your site might even rank somewhere on pages 1-3 before you begin building content. This is not the case when you pluralize the keyword, add a word like "best" or other one-off words in the domain name. Whenever possible, register the exact keywords, nothing more and nothing less, in your domain name.

But What About Used Domains?

If you have a domain name already that has valid PageRank, and is at least somewhat related to your new site's topic, you could use this instead of registering a new domain name.

But for best results I suggest that you go ahead and register a domain name with your exact keywords in it, then redirect your domain or domains with PageRank to your new site. That way you will send the PR to the new site, and the keyword domain will increase your site's relevancy in Google results.

Follow these methods for how to choose a domain name, and you are well on your way to making money with your blog!

About the Author:
To find out more methods of domain name selection for your profitable new website, visit David Morgan's blog about making money online. You'll find tips on how to build your site as well as reviews of various tools available on the market to build your site, increase traffic, and turn a profit.