Domain Name Research and Selection

As announced in my previous post, I’m setting up a new business and detailing all the steps as I complete them.  This post is the next installment in the series.

I already have a hosting account, so I didn’t have to purchase hosting.  I have an account with HostGator and have had for some time now.  For only $7.95 per month, I purchased an account with them that offers unlimited domains, so each time I want to start in a new niche, all I have to do is purchase a domain name, redirect it to my nameservers in HostGator, and create an addon domain in my hosting account.

Yesterday, I researched some available domain names and purchased one that I felt was appropriate for my “learn to play guitar” niche.  To do that research, I used a site called NameBoy.com and their two word search tool.

NameBoy lets you enter two keywords into their search and then it provides a large group of suggestions.  They display .com, .net, .org, .info, and more.  They also indicate the availability of the domain with each extension.

I, also, used GoDaddy’s search to help me find the domain.

When you search a specific domain in GoDaddy, they will tell you if it is available, but they also give many domain name suggestions to choose from.

It’s not that easy to find a real good domain name, especially one with a .com extension, which I recommend highly.  Keep searching until you find something appropriate.  Think about synonyms, hyphenation between words, and addon words like my, best, now, online, etc.  Godaddy uses that technique in their domain suggestion tool.

I ended up purchasing the domain myjamminguitar.com for this exercise.

I’ll go into domain redirection and addon domains in my next post.