What's in a Name?

One of the first considerations when starting a new blog or website is the name. What domain name you choose goes much deeper than just the name of your site. Yes you want it to say who you are and what your site is about but it goes deeper than that; unless you’re trying to brand yourself. That being said, branding requires a lot of money; or, a lot of time spent marketing & promoting and a certain amount of luck. Sites like eBay or Amazon have huge budgets to work with so unless your another Donald Trump, then consider choosing a name based on sound keyword research and SEO considerations.

What does keyword research have to do with choosing a site/domain name? In short… everything. Depending on the purpose and format of your site, it can make the difference to seeing some search engine traffic in 4 - 6 weeks and never seeing any. Now the reason I say depending is this. If your creating a blog, or an article based site, then you can use keywords per post; keywords in the title and in the post itself; and the search engines will pick up on this and rank that post by itself. I currently have hundreds of search terms coming up on the first page of Google that are for the most part unrelated as in Yes they are all digital products but the search term doesn’t say ‘digital’ or ‘ebook’.

One of the first steps I take when choosing a new site name or domain name is keyword research. For instance; let’s say that you’re going to create a jewelry site. Jewelry, if you do a keyword search, has huge traffic and huge competition. But by doing a keyword search using a good keyword tool use can break this down. I always look for modest traffic and competition. If there is no traffic to a keyword, obviously you don’t want to use it.

I always try to find a keyword or keyword phrase that has at least 5000 monthly searches. Once I find one that interests me; that is related to what my site will be about, I do a Google search to see what the competition is like. Here you want some competition but not too much. The number I look for is 1.5 million results or lower.

Also I check to see if there are lots of sponsored ads for the search term. With this criteria, you know there is money in this keyword otherwise nobody would be paying to have ads on it and the search results would be low or nil. You can take this one step further by looking at what the top Sponsored Ads are costing. This will give you an idea of the potential earnings this keyword could bring you. If you know that the top ad spot is costing $5 per click, you can use some generic conversion rates to determine what a sale might be worth. This will of course only be an approximation but it’ll give you an idea of whether to proceed to not.

Let’s use broad numbers like 5 – 15% conversion rate. For every 100 visitors, they would realize between 5 and 15 sales at a cost for advertising of $500. On the low end they would break even if they were making $100 per sale. The conversion rates could be lower or higher of course so here it becomes a judgment call. You can educate your guess further by doing some research through affiliate site to see what the average commission is for this particular niche.

Long story short; spend 95% of your time researching the name of your site of blog before casting it in stone. In the long run you’ll be extremely glad you did.

Cheers

Joseph

Joseph Murray is a professional online entrepreneur working full time since April 2006. The current project is 7 Dollar Books. Built on the Wordpress platform, 7 Dollar Books is an ideal source for authors looking for new markets to sell their books. Also with latest technology scripting, anyone with a Paypal address can market products from the site and instantly earn cash to their Paypal account.

http://www.7dollarbooks.com

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