Preparing for a domain name

You’ve finally taken the big plunge and decided to scrap that sub domain and go out on a limb and get one all your own. Congratulations! You’ve just made one of the wisest blogging decisions you will ever make bar none! But wait just a moment, cowboy. There are a few things you need to think about before you run off and spend your hard earned cash on a new domain name.

How heavily branded are you under your current name?

If you’ve had a blog for a few years as a sub domain you’re probably heavily branded. If that’s the case you won’t want to change your domain name to anything other than your current name. Meaning you might switch from bobsblog.rootdomain.net to bobsblog.net/com but you wouldn’t want to switch to a totally different name. Customers (your readers) need to build up trust to a new name and you risk losing a lot of them if all of a sudden your branding changes. Ultimately you need to decide if making a change will impact your branding to such a negative extent it isn’t worth it.

Is the domain name you want available?

You’re dead in the water if the domain name you want isn’t available. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it is not. It really goes back to branding. If you absolutely must have that domain name and it isn’t available currently you have a few options.

Contact the current owner of the name about selling or trading it

This is a simple as running the domain name through a whois site in order to find out the owner and get contact information. Then just shoot an email (or make a phone call to the listed owner) and tell them what you would like. Give them 3 to 5 days to respond before writing/calling back. At some point they will either say yes or no. If they say yes be prepared for sticker shock because they know you want that domain and since you contacted them they are in the drivers seat when it comes to pricing.

If they do offer it to you be sure to do some research on what you’ll be getting. For example if there’s only 3 days left before the domain name expires and reverts back to the registrar think if you want to spend money on it or not. Consider if you can’t get it and the original owner gets it will he still want to sell, or will his price go way up. Also consider the possibility that someone else is waiting for that name to get dropped. You might lose out altogether.

Find a similar domain name

Can’t get your hands on hannahshouse? Why not try for something similar like hannahs-house, or hannahshousehold. It may or may not be what you want to do, but sometimes it is the only option available to you. Just try to keep it as similar as possible to your current name so you don’t freak your readers out too much.

Use the same domain name but with a different extension

Just because someone else has one, two, three, or even four versions of the same domain name bought up doesn’t mean they have them all. Maybe you can get a .info or a .us or a .uk extension. Nothing wrong with using those extensions. As a heads up I’ve read that when you use a foreign nations domain extension (.uk for example) it is best from a SEO standpoint to have that particular site hosted in the home country of that extension. I don’t know how true that may or may not be, but it would certainly be something you should consider looking into during your research.

Are you prepared to make the move?

I’m not saying you need to have gotten all the work done before you get the domain name. I’m saying that you need to consider you’ll be doing a lot of work to get everything working properly. You’ll be updating logos and banners (if you didn’t get your exact name), updating links to work with the new domain name, contacting off site affiliates and asking them to update their links, dealing with transferring the blog itself (or website if that happens to be the case) so everything internally works.

Unfortunately buying a domain name and moving your operation to it isn’t always as easy to do as it could be. If you need help feel free to contact me about a domain/blog transfer and I would be happy to help you out. For a fee of course, but I deal with this almost everyday in the course of business so I like to think I’m fairly well versed in how to get things done.

Do you even know where to go to buy a domain name?

Everything else could be checking out just fine, but if you have no idea where to go to get a domain name it won’t do you a whole lot of good. At this point I’ll walk you through the normal domain buying process.

Find a registrar

The registrar is the company that will take your hard earned money and register your new domain name for you. I use a company called Name Cheap without any complaints at all in over 4 years. If you don’t like them just do a search for domain name registration in your favorite search engine and you’ll come up with all kinds of places to buy it from.

Check your domains availability on the registrar’s site

On the Name Cheap front page you should see a search feature like is pictured below. Use that to search for your domain name. Be sure to put a check mark in the extension(s) you are trying to locate as well.

Purchase the name

Assuming that all went well and the domain name is available now you’ll just purchase it. Again my experience is with Name
Cheap, not anyone else. But basically you’ll be taken to sales page where you will add your domain into the shopping cart in order to make the purchase. I won’t waste your time with a step by step walk through of the actual sale, but if you’ve ever bought anything on line before you’ll be just fine. If you’ve never bought anything you’ll be just fine as well.

Get hosting

A domain all your own doesn’t do you a bit of good if you don’t have a host to put it on. Take some time to find a host to fit your needs. I for one couldn’t possibly be happier with Host Gator. Their customer support is stellar in all situations not to mention their unlimited domains and unlimited bandwidth for only 9.95 per month.

Setup your domain name servers

The domain name server is what translates an IP address (example: 64.236.16.20) to a domain name (example: cnn.com). If you type either the name or the IP address into the browser bar you’ll be taken to the CNN home page. No one wants to have to remember a bunch of IP addresses so someone came up with the domain name.

When you setup your hosting they will give you the domain name information which you’ll go back to your registar’s control panel and use it. In the control panel look for something like “Transfer DNS” and follow the instructions there. Don’t delay doing this as it can take over 24 hours for the DNS to propagate during which time your site will likely experience outages. This is the perfect time to work on links, and other things that will be affected by the move.

In general the entire process is very simple to do and the benefits nearly always far outweigh the issues you might have with the entire process. The reasons to get a domain name of your own are well known, but in case you’re not clear on them I’ll list a few here as I close out.

• It looks more professional. Compare domainname.blah.net or wwww.blsahjgd.com/domainname to www.blsahjgd.com
• It is easier for readers to remember
• Search engines like real domain names
• You have full control over what happens on your own site. You can put ads up, take them off, do whatever with your site that you like.

Do I need to keep going on and on? Are you still undecided on making the change to a domain name or are you ready to take the plunge?

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