by Alan Roy Hocking
This week I want to look at how to choose a domain name for your affiliate marketing website.
Before you start to build your website you need to know what you are going to call your online business.
In most cases your domain name is going to be the name of your online business as well and just like choosing a name for your bricks and mortar business, your domain name should tell your readers exactly what your website is about.
It’s not always important to choose a niche related domain name for your affiliate marketing website but it will help with your search engine rankings if your domain name is relevant to your chosen niche.
Anyway, let’s move on and take a look at how I would choose a domain name for my website.
How to Choose a Domain Name For Your Affiliate Marketing Website
I’m presuming at this point you have already chosen your niche. If you haven’t already chosen your niche and you’re still not quite sure what products to promote I suggest you watch this video that Kyle from the Wealthy Affiliate University made about choosing a niche and then come back here.
Don’t worry the link opens in a new window so you won’t lose your place and I’ll wait here for you……..
Ah you’re back, good, I hope you enjoyed the video and it’s helped you to see just how vast the affiliate marketing industry is.
When I start looking for domain names I break them down into two categories:
Niche Related and Personal.
For this site I have chosen to use my full name because it’s my personal online business coaching site that also promotes my books.
This site is also about helping people learn how to earn an extra income online with affiliate marketing so I could have chosen a domain like “learnaffiliatemarketingonline” but there was too much competition (I’ll cover that in a minute) and it wasn’t personal enough for me.
If you are a coach or personal trainer then choosing a domain based around your own name is fairly easy and will help you to brand yourself as the product.
Also if you are planning on producing your own products like eBooks or Videos and DVD guides including your own name into the domain will help you with your personal branding further on down the line.
If on the other hand you are only interested in promoting other people’s products then a niche related domain name based around the products you will be promoting makes far more sense.
Exact Match Domains
A few years ago exact match domains or EMD’s as they are known in the industry were all the rage with the hard-core affiliate marketers because they would rank much faster and get you on page one of Google fairly easily, but Google has now gotten wise to this when people started complaining that all the sites on page one where just empty squeeze pages and didn’t give them what they were searching for.
Content really is king now and although it doesn’t hurt to have an exact match domain name the emphasis is much more on good quality content.
Having said that, if your chosen niche is fly fishing and you plan on promoting fly fishing equipment on Amazon then having a domain with “Fly Fishing Equipment” in the title is definitely going to help with your SEO.
Doing your home work and researching your niche with a proper keyword research tool is crucial at this point to discover exactly what your future customers are looking for so that you can narrow down your domain name to something that has a good search volume and lower competition and is going to produce some sales.
One of the best keyword research tools I have come across and always use when I’m trying to choose high search, low competition domain names is Jaaxy: You can read my review here.
Once you have researched the market place and made a note of a few possible names you would like it’s time to start searching for your domain.
A Few Points to Remember
A few pointers to remember when you do start searching for your own domain is always look for a “.com” first if it’s not available then maybe get the “.net” or “.info” as they do seem to rank quite well as well and I always try to go for the domain name complete without any dashes in the middle.
It’s a matter of personal preference but I have found that something like “flyfishingequipment.com” seems to work better than “fly-fishing-equipment.com” and it is easier to tell people your domain name without dashes in it as they will always forget to put the dashes in later when they try to search for it at home.
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