Choosing a domain name is seen as a big hurdle by new affiliates. You can easily get it into your head that you’re going to have to pay thousands for a good one, that all the good domains have gone, and that the ones left are either gay, psycho’s or lying.

Not true if you know where to look and how to look.

The reality is fairly good domain names are dirt cheap and in abundance, so much so that many experienced affiliates for an addiction to them, coming back from the pub with a great idea, snapping up names by the handful, then waking up with a receipt for abigloadofnonsense.co.uk.
Kirsty wrote an excellent post on the subject a while back.

The three steps we’ll go through are very simple

Step 1) Find the overall theme of your website

This is the one, or two word description of what your site is about. Our site is based on the Shoestring Travel data feed on TradeTracker.co.uk, so a quick look at the about us page and the following words spring to mind:

• Backpacking
• Trekking
• Adventure travel
• Group Tours

Step 2) Find out what search traffic there is for these terms already

Hop over to the Overture suggestion tool and put in your ‘top level’ phrases as above. Work your way down the list seeing if any phrases suit what your site is about.

Make a note of the number next to the phrase. This is the number of times the phrase was searched in Yahoo! in the previous month. It is actual searches being done by people looking for holidays.

Yahoo currently has a market share of about 12% so multiply that number by 8 and you have a rough number of the actual searches per month on that phrase. Its’ not an exact science so don’t get too hung up on the maths.

Click to enlarge

Why are domains important?

Type ‘backpacking travel’ into google, and you’ll see certain parts of the results in bold, including the URL. The domain name is a big clue to what the site is about, both to the user, and to Google.

Google’s ranking relies heavily on the links coming to your site. If your site is called ‘backpackingtravel.co.uk’ you will find it a lot easier to get links that say Backpacking Travel.
Step 3) See if the domain name is available

Take your best terms, the ones with the most searches, strip out the spaces and plug them into the search form at 123-reg.co.uk This will tell you which ones are available still.

Don’t get obsessed with a .com domain. UK customers get sick of clicking on .com domains and seeing dollar prices so there’s no real advantage there. They do perform a bit better on Google, but not a lot.

.co.uk’s are good , .org.uk’s are pretty good too. If you have a 2 word name and the version with a hyphen in it is available, that’s not bad either. e.g. if I’d gone for backpacking-travel.co.uk it doesn’t look too spammy.

The list below shows that outdooradventuretravel.co.uk is still available. A bargain at £2.59 per year and whilst the .com has been bought it’s not being used. According to our sums there were about 350-400 searches on that term in September which is well outside peak season for this site. You can easily double that in peak season.

Some more experienced affiliates would do some checks on the competition for the phrase “outdoor adventure travel” at this point, but I’m going to skip over that. Just getting started is really important on your first site. You’ll learn loads as you go along so don’t suffer ‘paralysis by analysis’ until you’re ready to commit large chunks of time to a single project.

The phrase is going to the the ‘core’ that you can grow lots of other phrases off such as:

• outdoor travel peru
• adventure travel australia
• cultural adventure travel

Whilst small, these will eventually add up to help the core phrase.
Our last step is to make sure that no-one has trademarked the name,which would be unlikely with such a generic domain. Check the UK trademarks office database. This is a bit paranoid but I nearly got caught out last year when I built a site on a trademarked term without checking. It all ended amicably enough, but I wasted a lot of time in the process.

OK, almost time to buy it.

If you know what the difference between a DNS record and a nameserver record is, then you’re probably savvy enough to go ahead and buy straight from 123-reg. If that’s all greek to you, hang on for the next article - choosing your hosting company.