So now you have decided to jump in and get a website, blog or simply register a domain to have a cool email address. Email address??? Yep, that’s right. An email address.

Choosing a domain name doesn’t have to be that difficult but, can be a fun creative process representing  you, your business and your brand.

As you go through the process of selecting a domain name, here are just a few things to consider.

Brand – Think about a strategy for your domain. Is your brand you or your business. When looking to brand yourself and using a domain such as “myself.com” or “myname.com”, can make for an exciting marketing strategy when branding yourself. It’s all about you! You could even consider (if available of course) something like “princess.com” or “imcool.com” and market and strategize the domain to reflect you and your brand/image without really using your own name.

Want to see if your domain name is available? Try looking here and see if it’s available.

When considering a domain name for your business, again, be creative. You’ll want to consider how the market, your customers or search engines will find and remember you. If by chance the domain you’re looking for happens to be taken, try combining words or parts of words for an alternative domain name that may include your primary domain with your industry type keywords.

Ease – Do your best to keep it simple. Having too many characters with numbers or hyphens, can be hard to remember for some. Especially when you use your domain name for email purposes. And for marketing and branding purposes, keep it where little explanation is needed to describe or explain your product and services.

Price – There are many registrars out there and prices will vary depending on the services offered by a company or if someone is simply price gouging for domain registration. Just keep in mind, don’t put out the big bucks for this. Also, registering your domain name should be a onetime annual fee. Unless of course you register for multiple years at one time, you should never pay for a monthly or quarterly domain registration service.

More than one – This can get interesting. So, you’ve come up with a cool name or have found the domain name that you want. But, there are other domain names that can associate with your brand or your primary domain name. As part of a marketing strategy, you could also register those available domain names and have them directed to your primary domain. An example would be your primary domain name is “exampledomain.com”. Next, the secondary domain name “myotherdomain.com” could be a great association to that primary domain name. So, you get both names registered then you have “myotherdomain.com” directed to “exampledomain.com”.

What this does is anytime someone is searching for you and can’t quite remember your primary domain name or, someone searches with particular keywords fitting your brand and seo strategy, the domain “myotherdomain.com” appears in the search. When they select “myotherdomain.com”, they will automatically be directed to your primary domain name “exampledomain.com”. Just another way to help increase traffic to your primary domain and of course, your website.

Selecting a host – Finding a hosting service can also be key to the success of your website traffic. Just as with domain registrars, there are many hosting services out there. But again, do a little research first. Prices and services can and will vary. Hosting services should also provide a control panel that gives you tons of features such as email tools, analytics, backup, free website building templates, database management and much more. Another great feature you should also find is free CMS software such WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and so on. Nice tools to build your website on.

As you go through this process of registering your domain name and hopefully moving on to build a site, stay encouraged and focused. It’s an exciting time to build your brand and name and there are many tools to help you do so. Have fun!!!

This article is part of EzBrz Groups training series.
Art Vivas, owner and founder of EzBrz Group, is a professional multimedia solutions provider, consultant and executive management leader.
For questions please email info@ezbrzroup.com