TIP:
You score bonus points on your page rank with search engines if you have one or more of your keywords in your domain name.
If the name you want is taken, come up with something else. For
example, don’t name your site something like Amazon.net when there’s
already an Amazon.com. Besides opening yourself up for legal
hassles, people expecting one site will land at the other and get
confused.
Come up with your own unique domain name and stand apart from the crowd.
Since you can get website hosting for less than $9 a month (and many come with a free domain name,
like mine), there’s no excuse to go with a free host either.
And speaking of things that look fly-by-night…
Let’s say you’re applying for a new mortgage and the lender asks you to
email some personal information, like social security number and date
of birth for you and your spouse, to her at:
a_mortgage_co@yahoo.com
For most of us, seeing that would sound alarms in our heads and red, neon signs flashing: DANGER! DANGER!
No respectable business would have a free email account (Yahoo,
Hotmail, MSN, gmail, etc.), yet many online businesses think it’s ok to
use them. It’s not, especially if you’re trying to establish
trust and credibility.
Most hosting companies give you unlimited email accounts for your site – use ‘em!
Go to your website’s control panel on your host’s site and set up whatever accounts you want, like:
Be sure to write down the information they give you:
If they use POP or IMAP,
The mail server for your email (example: mail.YourSite.com)
Your user name for your mail (not your user name to login!)
Remember Netscape? Its creator, Mozilla (the people behind the Firefox browser and Seamonkey), has a free email application, called Thunderbird, that lets you manage all of your email accounts for all of your websites in one place.
But What If You Have Lots of Products? Do You Need Lots of Different URL’s?
Big companies, like Purina, Arm & Hammer, Clorox, etc., have a
number of different products, each with their own URL, plus their
different promotions and contests have their own URL’s too. This
doesn’t mean they have hundreds of websites – usually each URL just
redirects you to a specific page on their main website. But these
companies are already household names and they aren’t using the
Internet to market their products. Their main focus is on using
TV commercials and coupons in the Sunday paper to reach their target
customers, and their website’s importance falls somewhere below having
little, old ladies hand out free samples in grocery stores.
Online stores that offer a gazillion different products, like
Overstock.com,
have one URL – the one they are marketing. Plus, it just wouldn’t
be practical to have a unique URL pointing to every single product on a
big site like that.
What are you marketing? What’s your website’s purpose?
If you’re selling five, ten or even twenty products online, I say
follow in the footsteps of the successful – have separate sites for
each of your products and give each site a purpose.
Jim Edwards has one
site for his blog, one site for his affiliate program, and each of his
products has its own site. And every one of these sites has a
specific purpose.
