Choosing the Right Domain Name:

a Marketing Perspective

all you need to know about domain names

(and some you don't need to know, but is interesting anyway)

CHAPTER 3.13
CHOOSING THE RIGHT DOMAIN NAME FOR A BLOG

Although the term 'weblog' was first used by Robot Wisdom in December 1997, 2005 was the year in which blogging (from weblogging) came of age as an online marketing tool (the term 'blog' introduced in 1999, and the practice dates back to the early 1990s). Moving beyond the 'traditional' blog - a kind of personal journal on subjects that interested the writer - commercial blogs are generated by organizations as a form communication to reach potential markets. As with websites, it is possible to host your company blog with a provider that offers free hosting - but you do so at your peril. Having a weblog address ending in something like blogspot.com or typepad.com might be OK if the blog is made up of your own personal content, but for the organizational blog this the mark of a beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously. In similar fashion to website hosting, I say register your own domain name and either pay for the hosting of your own blog or simply use one of the blog providers that allows you to have your own domain name (my blog is hosted by blogger.com, but the URL is alansinternetmarketingblog.com, not alansblog.blogger.com).

As far as name selection goes, the obvious choice is to add 'blog' to your existing domain and register it using the same suffix as the original. For example, atrustingbusiness.com becomes atrustingbusinessblog.com. Or, if you can host the blog on your server, simply use a third level domain on your own - blog.atrustingbusinesss.com. If you are using your blog to generate interest in a market - in the same way as the community website described earlier - go for the generic word or phrase with 'blog' added. From the example I used in the earlier community domain name section, gardeninghintsandtips.com would become gardeninghintsandtipsblog.com. Or, as not every generic word or phrase with 'blog' added has been registered, you could try gardeningblog, gardenblog, gardensblog, gardenerblog or gardenersblog. The suffix is not so important because users are most likely to access the blog pages through a newsletter, RSS feed, search engine or your own website - making memorizing the correct suffix unnecessary, though as a rule of thumb use the same suffix as your main website. Who knows, one day we might have a .blog suffix?

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Copyright copyright 2009 Alan Charlesworth. All rights reserved.
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