Affiliate101.com » Domains

Cheap Hosting for Affiliates

dennis — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:02:46 +0000

One way to quickly eat away at your profit is if you get caught up in a bad hosting program. Pricing can vary greatly from provider to provider, so it’s important to find the right host. We will add new hosts to this page as we review them.

BlueHost – Web, Reseller, and Dedicated Hosting Packages starting at $6.95 a month.

If you are moving from another host, they provide free transfers. If you are new to building a site, they have a free site builder program. Check out BlueHost.

Selecting a Domain Name

dennis — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:18:48 +0000

In a perfect world, you would be able to go to a domain registrar, type in the best domain that fits your site, pay your $8, and begin building your dream. Well, this isn’t a perfect world. Hasn’t really been since the late 90s (or in some cases alot earlier). So, here’s what you can do to secure a domain that you are going to be happy building a new site with.

Pick another Domain Name
You can give up on having a really good domain, and just pick things until you find something that is available. Do a Domain Search at DomainTools.com. You can also check your desired domains, and see if they are for sale. DT will list the price above it, or say if they are taking offers. You may also want to go to the domain to see if they have any information there.

Previously Registered
Another way to find a good one that is available, is to do a suggestion search. If someone registered it before, that means someone liked it enough to spend some time and money to register it. There are alot of crap domains registered, but there are some good ones too.

Auction and For Sale
There are a number of websites that auction domains off, or display for sale prices. You can search those on DomainTools also.

Domain Search Tools
There are some new sites out there that help you try to find names you hadn’t thought of. DT can help with that, but there are a handful of others also. Try a site called Bust a Name. You can enter a few keywords in, and they will try them in different order, different combinations, and offer suggestions for other words. Very cool site.

The Importance of a Domain Name

dennis — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:03:57 +0000

People often ask “How important is a domain name?” The answer to that is a tough one. So I’m going to break it into sections so you can apply it to what you are interested in the domain for.

SEO Website
A google search can return many bad domains, along with some really great domains. Take a look at the content on those pages. The good domain could get away with poor content and optimization, and still rank OK, while the bad domain (not necessarily bad, but it doesn’t contain the keywords) is likely ranking because the website is well planned out with good content and optimization.

PPC Landing Page
If all you’re going to do is have a single page where you will send PPC traffic to, the domain could be a bit more important. People look at that along with your ads title and description. If you are selling car parts, and your domain is sugarkisses.com, you can sugar kiss that potential customer good bye. Try to get something that says “car parts”. Unless you have a bank roll, don’t expect to go and register carparts.com, but you could possibly register carpartnation.com, or carpartalley.com.

Buzz or Brand Website
What I mean by Buzz or Brand website, is that it’s a site that is something that people will talk about, or write an article about. For that, any domain would work, if it’s catchy. When the guys at Google decided to build a little search engine, they probably would have loved to get the domain search.com, or searchengine.com, but those had long been registered. They then picked a word that was related to what they were trying to do, and then changed it a bit to get a name that was available. Now that’s a brand.

In summary, the importance of the domain really depends on what it is you plan to do with it. There are probably more bad domains out there making money than there are good domains, and I bet you can rattle off 20 domains that don’t mean anything either.