You want a domain name you can centralize your business around. This is very important and should not be overlooked. This is not your business name – if you register a business, the formal name of the business can be something else.

You could also think of it as a stand-in name and website. Mine is power-trust. I’m not using “power” in its domineering sense but more linked to the “power” gained through trust and honesty. If you go there, there may not be much development at all. I use the name as a reference point for my emails, such as, admin at that central domain, and for support needs. It’s used in my privacy policies and so on.

You can use the website flexibly, changing it as you wish to fit changing circumstances and as your business develops. So, you could leave it almost empty, put a few ads on or develop it as a central point referring to your products and services.

However, its main purpose is a marker for your developing business and a name which people will recognise as representing your business, the more you use it. You could have sub-folders with your main services in them, such as main tools or resources.

Without a central site, with a clearly identifiable domain name, your business may have no clear focus, even though you may brand it in other ways.

Where do you get domains?

There are register sites where you can choose and register a domain. Many domain names are already taken, so you may have to be creative in getting yours. Usually, they’re about $9 a year.

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Maybe you’ve heard that a long domain name is a good idea. For a long time there was a limit to how many characters could be used in a domain name. Then that limit was increased to 63 and that makes for a pretty long domain indeed. A lot of Internet marketers then touted that a long domain name was key to getting good traffic. This can be true, depending on the type of website you are building and what your goals are.

If you are building a site for the sole purpose of driving traffic to it, then a longer domain name is just fine. You’ll want to focus on a longtail keyword and make sure your domain name consists of this keyword in its entirety. This makes the search engines look at your domain as one that is specifically dedicated to that search term. This will help your search rankings significantly because it seems that you’re invested and focused on that search term. If you follow through with it and include lots of information geared to that term, and expanding on it, then you should get good rankings and visitors.

However, if you are trying to build your website around users, and hoping that they’ll interact with your site and pass it on to others, you’ll want to go with a shorter domain. People are a lot different than search engines. While a search engine can scan your domain name and figure out how many words it contains and what those words mean in a fraction of a second, humans take a little longer. A long domain is hard on the eyes, and takes more than a few seconds to decipher if it contains more than 3 words. If you expect people to connect with it on an emotional level and care about it enough to share it with their friends, you’ll want to make the name cool and catchy, not long and wordy.

There are some exceptions to this rule of course, and many examples abound of sites that have longer names with several words and still manager to be successful. One example is MyLifeIsAverage.com which contains a four word sentence. They have a large number of users and it’s enjoyed lots of success and has gone viral. If you are planning to start a site of this nature, and have a cute and memorable sentence in mind, you might be able to pull it off.

It only takes a quick scan of the most successful sites on the planet to realize that generally speaking a short, memorable domain name is best. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, GoDaddy, Apple, Dell, Digg, WordPress, and countless other sites with short one word names that you can’t forget.

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