Coming up with a domain name can be fun and challenging. My first stop is always the Wordtracker Keyword Selector site. Let’s say you have decided to base your blog on golf. Type GOLF into the keyword selector, and click the hit me button. It show you the top searches with the words golf. You can see how many time each was searched over a fixed period (not sure what the time frame is though).
You want to try to come up with a domain that has solid keywords in it. Having keywords in your domain doesn’t guarantee that you will get the traffic related to those keywords, but it helps.
Look down the list for keywords that work for you. How about “how to hit a golf ball”.
Open another window and go to GoDaddy.com. Type in howtohitagolfball. Leave the suffix as “.com” as that is the one you will want. Unfortunately HOWTOHITAGOLFBALL.COM is already taken. So now try how-to-hit-a-golf-ball. That’s taken too. Try HowNotToHitAGolfBall. Hey, that’s available. Open a text document, and type that one in there. Keep brainstorming and trying different keyword combinations. Record the ones that are available. After you get a bunch, decide which one you want to use. If you don’t like any of them, keep looking.
You can also try things like GolfCity, GolfTown, GolfCountry, MyGolf, GolfersRule, etc.
Have fun. But don’t stress over it too much. Eventually you need to pull out your credit card and register the domain. I recommend using GoDaddy. You might be able to find some place a little cheaper, but if they are small, and go out of business, it might be a pain to try to move your domain to someplace else. GoDaddy has been around for a while, will like be around for a while longer. And their prices aren’t too bad. They currently charge about $10/year, but often offer discount codes if you can find them. I usually register the domain for 3 years, you can do anywhere from 1-5 years.
