2nd Article in The Blogging Experiment-Finding and Registering Your Domain Name

So you have your blogs niche and focus, now its time to buy the domain. This is one thing that I believe you must absolutely spend money on. While some free domain name providers are reputable it isn’t as stable as buying one. Of course, this is only my personal opinion. But before buying the domain you need to decide what you want the domain to be, find out if it is available and then register it.

Finding Your Domain

What I usually do is figure out which keyword I want to use, in my case it was “Charmed”. Of course it is preferable that your domain name be the actual name of your website. The second option could be the initials of your domain name but I wouldn’t recommend this as there would be no keywords in the domain.

You could also get hyphenated domain names but this is usually a last resort. I recommend sticking with domain names that are three words and under. To get ideas on domain names I like to use Psychic Whois which provides suggestions as well as the availability of the domain.

As for TLD’s the most desirable extension would be a .com, with .net and .org being the runner-ups. There are other TLD’s but these three are among the most prominent.

On to what I did.

I used Psychic Whois to find possible names for the Charmed site such as CharmedBlog.com, CharmedOnes.com, and CharmedSite. The names didn’t flow for me, were taken or didn’t fully match what I wanted so I opted to add “The” to the front of CharmedSite.com which resulted in TheCharmedSite.com then all that was left for me to do was to register it.

Registering Your Domain

There are many places where you can register your domain, some are cheaper and some are more expensive. Some have extra features such as free private registration and other stuff.
Heres a list of five domain name registrars, their price for a .com, and the fee for private registration. I have also linked them so that they go straight to the domain order page.

1&1 Internet-$6.99/year-Free Private Registration
Godaddy-$9.99/year-$8.99 Private Registration
Name-$5.99/year-Free Private Registration
NameCheap-$9.29/year-Free Private Registration
WebTalkDomains-$9.99/year-$7.95 Private Registration

Let me tell you right now to just get the domain and if you want, the private registration. You most likely wont need any of the features that they’ll push on you.
Now that we have a domain name all registered and ready to go, its time to get your web hosting which will be covered in the next article.

To be sure that noone visit’s the site before its time, I have changed the settings so that it redirects to Unlock The Online World.