We have discussed product creation and domain name registration in detail. Next step is getting a webhost, create and publish your website.

Before we move to that let us briefly understand how does web work. This may continue for next few posts but it is worth understanding.
You must have an idea about basic working of the place where you are going to conduct your business.

If you run through a trouble tomorrow then you must be able to understand whether this problem is because of browser, web host, your webpage, your script or your internet connection.

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As we discussed in the last post, a domain name is the web address to your website. When somebody types yourwebsite.com, he is telling the browser to go to your IP address. This is the way people surf on the net and this is the way people communicate with each other about webpages.

Yourwebsite.com will become recognition of your business in the coming times. It is important that you choose this name carefully. Here are few things that you should take into consideration when choosing a domain name.

Your domain name should be as relevant to your business as it can be. So a thorough research and brainstorming would be a great help. It is important to remember that the domain can be of any length up to 67 characters. This includes the 26 letters of the English alphabet, numbers 0-9, and hyphens (-).

The domain name cannot begin or end with a hyphen but can contain one or more hyphens.

Using this you should think a list of possible combinations that you might wish to use. This can be achieved by listing words related to your preferred domain name or related to the content of your website.

For example, suppose you are planning a website on online business tutorials. You would list all the synonyms and acronyms you can think about this business and then produce a combination using letters, numbers and hyphen only. Try to produce combinations which are preferably short, memorable, not easily confused, hard to misspell, relate to your business and convey a message about your business of your business. You can also use long combinations which are easier to remember as in howtodriveyourcar.com.

In the example take above, let us brainstorm

onlinebusinesstutorial

onlinebusinesstutorial2007

internetbusinesstutorial

ibiztutorial

ebusinesstutorial

ibusinesstutorial

ebusinesslesons

ebusinessclassroom

online-business-tutorial

And so on. Create a list of as many words as you can.

After you have created this list, you would need to go to a domain name registrar and check whether your chosen domain name is available. If it is not then you would need to alter and adjust a bit.

It is worthwhile here to mention about extension or top level domains ( TLDs). Thers are many available now and you can choose any of them if you wish. Common TLDs and the type of organizations the names are associated with are listed below

.com commercial business domain

.net commercial network

.org nonprofit organizations

.edu educational institution

.gov government agency

.mil military

.info,.tv and.fm are other types which have surfaced lately. While .info is associated with information, .tv and .fm are actually country specific codes but are popularly used for tv and radio organizations.

At the time of this writing .com rules the business world. Most of the business persons prefer to use .com as TLDs rather than settling for .net or .org.

There are reasons for this.

.com domains have an international appeal. They look more credible. .com domains are easily remembered. Everybody who uses internet knows and understands .com extensions. All you need to stress upon is first part. I can afford to write Home for Profits instead of homeforprofits.com every time which would not have been possible if the site was .org or.net. You need to stress on the extension as well in that case.

But disadvantage is that most of the good .com domain names have already been taken. You might have to adjust your name against the availability.

If a .com name is available go for it. Otherwise you can settle for other extensions.

If you plan to sell intangible products, do not go for country code extensions. They are more used for services contained in the country itself.

While use of hyphen can help you to find a good domain name and may be advantageous for search engine ranking but your visitors would have difficulty in remembering that hyphen. They often would type the domain name without the hyphen and would go to other site. If you wish to choose, do not hyphenate more than once.

Avoid using 0(zero) until it is a part of some other number like 500 or 1000.

0 ( zero) is often confused with vowel o.

Until and unless you are pressed do not use ’2′ or ’4′ in place of ‘to’ or ‘four’. People will have difficulty in remembering that.

All said and done, whatever you choose can be made popular and pushed into people’s minds by aggressive marketing. But if you stay within the directions proposed, you can use your aggression for building other parts of your business.

Suggested Further Reading and Resources:

• Domain Name Suggestion Tool!
• Domain Profit Guide
• Host Gator

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A domain name is a name that identifies a computer or computers on the net. This is the definition that we are concerned with as an online marketer. Technically domain name also implies many other relates meanings but we would stick to the definition we have just discussed.
The domain name is also called hostname or more commonly referred as web address. They provide more memorable names to stand in for numeric IP address. Thus it is because of domain name that you can remember the names instead of numbers.

{It is easier to remember somedomain.com instead of 142.168.0.254.}

(Note:An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard IP in simpler terms is a computer address. Routers, computers, time-servers, printers, internet fax machines, and some telephones?can have their own unique address.)

The flexibility of the domain name system allows multiple IP addresses to be assigned to a single domain name, or multiple domain names to be assigned to a single IP address.

Before we go further let us differentiate between domain name and a URL or universal resource locator

URL: http://somedomain.com
Domain name: somedomain.com

In this example the domain name has two parts somedomain and .com.
.com is called top level domain( TLD) and somedomain would be called second level domain. Similarly if you make a further subdomain and name it somename then the address to that would become somename.somedomain.com.

In such situations somename would be called third level domain. You can create any number of domains on a TLD without any restriction. Domains of third and higher levels are commonly called subdomains.

You must have come across many kinds of TLDs when surfing the web.
.com is most commonly used top level domain. Others which are commonly used are .org, .biz, .net etc. There are many others TLDs which are permissible by ICANN (nternet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.) which looks after the work of assignment of domain names and IP addresses. Currently this list includes following TLDs-

• .aero: Reserved for the global aviation community. Sponsored by Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques SC (SITA)
• .asia: Reserved for the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific region. sponsored by DotAsia Organisation

• .biz: Restricted to businesses, operated by NeuLevel
• .cat: Reserved for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community, sponsored by Fundaci? puntCat.
• .com : Operated by Verisign Global Registry Services
• .coop : Reserved for cooperatives. Sponsored by Dot Cooperation LLC.
• .info: Operated by Afilias Limited
• .jobs: Reserved for the human resource management community. Sponsored by EmployMedia LLC,operated by Afilias Limited
• .mobi: Reserved for consumers and providers of mobile products and services sponsored by mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd.
• .museum : Restricted to museums and related persons. sponsored by the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma)
• .name: Restricted to individuals. Operated by Global Name Registry.
• .net: Operated by Verisign Global Registry Services.
• .org: Operated by Public Interest Registry
• .pro: Restricted to licensed professionals. Operated by RegistryPro
• .travel: Reserved for entities whose primary area of activity is in the travel industry. Sponsored by Tralliance Corporation.

Wow! You have so many choices.

But that is not all. Apart from these TLDs which are called generic TLDs and are under direct control of ICANN, there are many country code TLDs or ccTLDs which are country or region specific. Thus .in is for India and .uk is for UK. ( I will publish a separate list for all countries/regions).

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