Domain Names: What They Are, How to Choose One, And How to Purchase The Right Domain

1. Domain Class Intro: Hi, My name is Doug, and I'm with marketing beast dot com. And in the short class, we're gonna cover all things domain. So what domain names are? How to go about choosing one and how to ultimately purchase one. This class is right for you. If you're looking to get online and set up a website for your new business or portfolio site for your artwork or photography, Or basically, you're just learning a little bit more about the Web in this class. We're going to cover some of the technical aspects behind what a domain name is beyond. Just knowing that, you know, like skill share dot com. It is an address for a place on the Internet, and in addition to that, we're gonna go over a couple of tips and tricks and strategies with regard to selecting your domain and choosing things like top level domain. So dot com dot net dot org's what's the difference? Doesn't matter. And then, ultimately, a couple of other suggestions with regard to setting up your domain for your business. So if this sounds like it's appealing to you, I encourage you to click the enroll button at the end of the short clip. Thanks for watching 2. What Is A Domain Name?: all right, so let's go ahead and start off with what is the domain name. In essence, it's a human friendly representation of an Internet protocol resource, which is a mouthful to say the least. But basically, when your computer is cruising around the Web and looking for different websites, it's actually using a numeric address like you see here this I p address the 1812241382 to 6, which is super difficult to remember. You'd much rather just type in a domain name like marking these dot com. And so if you were to go to that I p address, you'd actually get to my website. Or you might get to a page that my host puts up to prevent people from accessing it. So domain names are basically easy to remember labels like when you hear radio ads and they want you to remember their phone number, they're gonna use something like 1 800 hot love because it's so much more easy to remember . Then you know, 804 685683 and once created domain names were added to the domain name system, where they're matched up with corresponding I p addresses. So this is what your registrar is doing for you. Like go Daddy. Your name cheap. They're essentially registering this domain and matching it to an I P address. And this is great Not only because it makes it a lot easier for us as humans to remember where websites are located, but it also makes it a lot easier to switch between different i p. So let's say I wanted to switch from Go Daddy hosting to cite ground hosting instead of having to tell everyone now that my website is hosted at 181 dot to dot to it above a block , I can just keep my domain name and then the i p changes in the background and this is all updated in that domain name system. And if you want to play along at home, I invite you to go to this website this site 24 times seven dot com and find out the i P address of one of your favorite websites. And now from here, let's go ahead and talk about the different components of the u. R. L. So you are l, which you've probably heard before does contain the domain name. But what we think of as a domain name is really the second level domain. So you can see now in the page here we've got multiple different components to a your L, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator. All right, so we've got our protocol, which is hypertext transfer protocol. And then we've got what's called a sub domain. So this could be something like blawg or wwW is technically a sub domain. Or it could be, you know, news or about or anything. And then our second level domain, which is what we're used to, like Yahoo or Google or something like that. Then our top level domain, which could be dot com dot net dot or GTA and about 100 plus different new ones now that have been released. And then after that, then you get into things like the directory path and the absolute path so you can think of it a lot like a file system on your computer, right? So you're directory path is kind of like a folder, and then the individual file within that folder is the article dot html html Just being the appendix for what file type it is. So it could be PHP or a lot of hymns. Don't even need that when accessing websites anymore. So from here, let's go ahead and talk about how to choose a domain name for your new online business or blogging venture or whatever you plan to do on the Interwebs. 3. Choosing A Domain Name: Considerations: All right, So now we're gonna move on to how to choose a domain name. So not to break any hearts. But the first time you go looking for your domain as a dot com, it is highly likely that it will not be available. Pretty much any one or two word dot com domains are taken, as are many dot nets and dot org's. So if that is the case, don't despair. There are other options out there, so there's actually a lot of other top level domains right now. I think hundreds have actually been released over the past couple of years, and so some new options are like dot io dot biz dot co dot me etcetera. All right. And then another thing that you could do is, let's say you have your company name and it's already taken. Then you could add something onto it, right? Like, uh, I'm not positive, but I believe nissan dot com actually belongs to a computer company. And so Nissan, the car company, has Nissan Motors dot com. So it's good to think about domain adults like another tech company I can think of is this marketing automation tool called Edgar, And so presumably Edgar dot com was taken. So what they have is meet Edgar dot com. So think about other things that you might be able to add on to your domains, which I call Adams dot coms. Don't get me mistaken, though. Are the preferred choice if they are available. So this is in the case that you cannot find your domain. Um, another thing to keep in mind is the length, right? So you want your domain name to be memorable, And that means not too long. So the longer domain gets, uh, less memorable it iss. So just just keep that in mind, you know, minutes just based on personal preference, but just something to think about when purchasing another idea is to think about what are called domain hacks. And these air basically ways of using different top level domains in order to create a word or phrase. So a couple that I thought about were about dot me, which is a company that does these personal profiles. And so they're using the top level domain of the country of Montenegro. So to get that about dot on me and then YouTube when they created their shortened version of their links to be You know why i o u t u dot e They use the top level domain of the country of Belgium. Eso they shortened it that way, please refer to as domain axe. You know, if your absolutely in love with a particular domain and it's owned by someone else, you might look into contacted them directly or look into domain auctions. So domains when someone is tired of using them or, you know, doesn't have a use for them for their business or anything, they might want to turn and sell them. That's the way, actually, that I got marketing beast dot com is I spent a few $100 in order to get it because I liked how it sound. And it was a dot com domain. So at the price point that I found it at it made sense to me to buy it on auction. Um, but just keep in mind that sometimes auctions for a single word. Domains can be incredibly expensive. For instance, I've got this down here that this is currently the most expensive domain sold. According to Wikipedia, at least, which insurance dot com for $35.6 million. So obviously it depends on what your price point ISS now a really great tool that I've used in the past to help me pick a domain is the site domain er dot com. So they help you out by allowing toe try sort of different mixes of your domain name or your potential domain name. Really? So it's good and hop over there real quick and take a look. Click there. Okay, so in the field here, let's go ahead and type in my domain name, so we'll go with marketing Beast and we'll see what it says. So it's showing that, you know, marking beast dot com has obviously taken here because I own it. But it's giving me some other ideas. So it's saying like, Hey, actually, you could get, you know, be stock market. Duck market is an actual new top level domain now and then a whole slew of other options that are sort of riffs on the domain to give you some other ideas. You know, if you decided that you wanted to do something like, you know, I don't know green products, so you want to do something in the, you know, recyclable products, face or green, healthy living type space. Then it gives you some ideas here. So you could do products that Earth or products green products that shop or something like this. Anyway, this is just that a nice little tool that's free to use and help you hopefully hone in on a good domain for your business. Blawg personal portfolio, etcetera, and, um All right, I'll see in the next slide. 4. Social Name Checking: are. So let's say you've picked out what you think might be a great domain name and you're getting ready to pull the trigger on purchasing it. Now there's one more step that you might want to take prior to making that purchase, and that is doing a quick social name check. And what I mean by this is to see if there any other people, brands, companies, organizations that are already using the same or very similar name on social networks, especially the major. Looks like Facebook, instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etcetera. And I mean, this doesn't mean that if you find that someone's using the same profile name that you can't go ahead with this purchase. But it's just something to keep in mind because it can be a little bit nicer when your branding something and able to use the same name across all of these different sites Now. Personally, when I was trying, when I purchased marketing these dot com found that Facebook I already had a marketing beast on there. I just added page the end of its that's facebook dot com slash martin beast page. Um, but just again something keep in mind. So what's a fast way to do this. The fast way no is to go to a site like this, which is no dot com Click on this. And then here you can just type in whatever you're considering for your for your name. So let's go ahead and go with one skill shirts. Let's do something like Skilled, uh, which I'm sure is probably taken because it's short and snappy and, um, on here we can see that that name is, in fact, already taken on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, all the sort of majors. So if I'm considering using this name, I might want to think of something else, unless I can think of are really nice. Add on to it to use on these social sites. Also, you want to be cautious about sort of, especially in cases where there might be some confusion between you and another organization. Let's say your wedding photographer who wants to teach classes on how to get into wedding photography business and then another wedding photographer is using a social media handle that is the same as whatever your says your company. That could be a conflict that you know confuses consumers now, line. So something to keep in mind before make the domain name purchase. And so that covers this quick segment on social name checking in the next, I will talk about actually purchasing the domain itself. 5. Buying Your Domain Name: all right. We are on the home stretch of this mini course on domains What they are, how to choose them and how to buy. So we're onto the buying of domains. Very exciting. So one thing to keep in mind prior to pulling the trigger on purchasing your domain is to make sure that you actually buy it from a registrar, OK? And not just your website host. The host is where you host all your files. So if you're gonna wordpress site you hosted install your WordPress site, they're right. And then your registrar is typically in a different place. So with a different service, I personally like to use name cheap. I like him because of their prices, their service and, um yeah, generally, they're just easy to use. I also have a few domains with go, Daddy, But they I swear, tryingto Upsell You own stuff every 3.5 seconds when your other websites so that I don't like is much. Um, but the reason that it's nice to keep those separate is that sometimes you find yourself changing hosts and it could be that, you know, you find a host that offers a better price or potentially you want to switch to a host that has a better service in that, you know, you start to get thousands of visitors a month and you want to go with someone who provides more of a premium service. You know, faster servers, those kind of things. And then it's just it's nice to have just all your demands. One spot and then you're hosting can change wherever it is and you're not thinking like, Oh, shoot. Now that I changed to this host, I've still got my domains on this host. And so it's good practice Keeping separate. Um, another thing to keep in mind when you're purchasing your domain is it's probably a good idea to opt for something like Who is guard or some sort of privacy protection service on top of your domain? It's typically just a few bucks that year, and what it does is it makes sure that all of your personal information is not there for the public to see on the who is registry. So any time someone registers a domain name, it's standard practice to have that person's information publicly available right, But you can use a proxy privacy service to put something there in place of that. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you what that looks like here. So let's go ahead and go toe who dot is, uh, which is one of many places where you can look it up. It's also a domain hack if you've been following along. So go ahead and hop in here. And I happen to know for a fact that skill share is using a privacy service on their domain . Okay, so we get in here who does is it tells us a bunch of really interesting information here. Like we find out what the name servers are. So the i p addresses of the name service of the site, but also the register data in terms of contact information So we can see in lieu of John or Jane Smith in name. We should get this contact privacy, ink and a customer number s Oh, they're just acting as a privacy proxy here to kind of protect, you know, whoever purchased and registered the web name of the domain name, keep their information private on, then they've got just a, you know, anonymous generated email address here to further protect that person's privacy. So that's who is in a nutshell. And let's go ahead and hop over to name cheap, just toe, walk you through the process of what it looks like, uh, to get the purchase process going. So here we just want to type in one. So let's say you know, hide really like this domain. Okay, so most likely no one's purchase that that'd be weird if they had. So we go in here and then we're gonna see, you know, the availability of the different top level domains in here. So we see that dot com is available. Terrific. We go ahead and add that tour cart, and then we'll have your cart, and at this point, you know that we can see the breakdown of the price. So it's this price per year. You know, if you know that you're gonna have it for quite a while, it can be a good idea to buy it for a few years in a row. Then also, just because I know that it's happened to me a bunch of times, it's probably in your best interest, you know, for 10 or 15 bucks, a year to just put it on auto renew because if you don't want to renew your site, you can lose the domain name, right. And what happens is you have a grace period of, I think, a couple of weeks where you can actually repurchase the domain. But after that, then there's another two weeks to a month or something that where it cost you 80 plus dollars to get the domain Mac. And then it actually goes into a queue to be made public again for purchase. At that point, it's basically lost into the ether until it comes back on the market again. Or some domain speculating company comes in, snaps it up and it turns around and tries to sell it for hundreds to thousands of dollars. So seeing that happened enough times to, I highly recommend that you just select auto renew and also just, you know, do yourself a favor and get and get a couple of years right out of the bat. The other thing to keep in mind here is who is guard. This is enabled. Another great thing about named Cheap is they include this for free on here for one year subscription. Eso make sure that that's enabled Protect your privacy and that's pretty much all you need to know. You know, at this point, you know, there are other add ons that you can purchase, but this will get you up and going with your first domain name so that we have it. Thanks for following along. And please look out for my other videos that will help you and your business get online and out in front of your audience with digital marketing and all that good stuff. So thanks again and I'll see you in my other videos.