Researching and Buying a Domain

1. Researching and Buying a Domain Name Course Intro: Hey, I want to welcome you to how to accomplish researching and buying a domain. And in this course, we're gonna cover several topics that involve everything you need to know about buying the perfect domain for your business. And we're gonna go through step by step, from beginning to end, how to research and by the perfect domain. So let me show you really quick what is covered in this course. So the first topic is domain planning, and this involves really from the beginning thinking about your website, what's gonna be on your website and what would be the best type of domain for your business and they want to go through trademark research. I'm gonna show you some simple things and some simple ways to search on the Internet to make sure that nobody has claim and rights to the domain and the branding that you want to use for your website. Now this right here is very important, and a lot of people overlook this. But this can actually protect your business in the future by doing this simple research, and they're going to go into how to actually do domain research and come up with different combinations, different ideas and different domains for your business. Now he may have some ideas in mind, and a lot of times they're not available. So I'm gonna show you some pretty cool tools. So in the end, you'll have several options on whatever you want to choose for your final domain. And finally, I'm gonna show you how to buy that domain online, the best site to buy it from and the things you need to consider when you get a purchase. Your domain. So again, this is an A to Z course on buying the perfect domain and how to accomplish it. And again, thank you for checking out this course, and I hope to see you on the first video. 2. Planning a Domain Purchase: have got the website planned questionnaire open. And this is gonna be your base, Like I talked about to build your website, so we want to fill this out as completely as possible. The first question, What's the name of the Blawg? I'm gonna use an example. Let's say we're in the basket weaving, uh, kind of kind of boring, but let's use it as a as an example. Hope nobody is the basket weaver out there and have offended anybody. But let's just say that's what our websites gonna be about. So, uh, let's call it basket weaving tips and tricks. And our goal is to teach people about basket weaving. Domain is gonna be what the u R l is gonna be for when people pull the blogger up, we may not know it now. We may think we know it and we'll get into a video on checking domains and researching them , see if they're available, branding and trademark and some topics like that. But for now, let's just enter, uh, just either a placeholder or what we think we want the domain to be. So let's go ahead in her basket. Weaving is supercool dot com I have a feeling that one probably available. The next question is what are the main keywords for the site? And these are key words that you want to tie to your side kind of general topics. Eso obviously basket weaving. We could save basket weaving tips, basket weaving information. We'll get into keyword research and what that means and more depth in another video. But for now, just enter what you think is right. Love description. We want to teach. Okay, people all about basket weaving blood categories would be the structure of your blog's section. How you want to go and set that up. And this is again. This is a place holder, but let's say we want a tip section. We want a product section. Maybe you'll promote some basket weaving products. Maybe have a resource is section. Then the next question is, which pages do you want to create? Typically, on a blawg, you'll have static pages. Such a services products, contact etcetera. I would definitely recommend having a contact page, maybe a products page. If you're promoting products. The Services page as an example. If you have a business and you want to promote your services. Maybe it may be a help or a fax section as examples. So the next question What is your main email address? We're going to set up a Google account. Ah, Gmail account that will tie to Google analytics and some other things to help promoter Blawg. This question is, what main email address do you want to use on your domain? And this would be like a contact email address. I would recommend contact at your domain dot com. So in this case, basket weaving is super cool dot com. What colors would you like on your your blawg? Um, again, this is just a place holder. We could have a red and white. Maybe I saw a site that I liked was red and white. Maybe you've seen another website that you like as an example. So what you could do here is Anderson murals of some sites that you like, and we're not gonna copy the site, but this gives you a good idea. Maybe a base to kind of, you know, when we build our site what? It what it might look like or take elements of it that you like, So this could be site, one site to set her. And in the last section here, I've left a space for you to go and put some extra notes in. Maybe you have some ideas right now. You want to jot down a zit, we get through this in you, you get thio more the course. Maybe you want to add to it. So like I said, this is your blueprint. This is what you're gonna use to start with and you can add to. And this is always something that's going to be there for you to reference. I highly recommend you fill this thing out right now to get the ideas flowing and then refer back to it as you progress in the course. So go ahead and take some time to think about it. Fill this out and then I'll see you in the next video. 3. Trademark and Copyright Check: Okay, The first thing we want to do is we want to pull up Google, and we would just want to do a general search for a brand name to see if anything pops up. So let's go. Steve's basket weaving tips. That's gonna be the name of my block. That's my brand. And when I do a quick search, nothing is popping up, not saying anything. So the next place I would go to is this site for trademark searches and all of these links that I'm showing you their available in the resource is section. So I just want to do this as quickly as possible. So you're not Watch me pull up all these sites. But I would the next day I would you would go to this trademark site and I would do the same thing. I would I would search for it and nothing there. Ah, did the same thing on this copyright search. Nothing pops up if you if I got more general as an example here, you'll see what happens. You are gonna get some results. So, uh, it's better to be cautious on this. A zai mentioned I think before you know I built out of sight and didn't check this at the beginning and down the road. I've got in trouble. So it's just a quick, easy thing. You you need to do, you know, to search, especially if you're developing a new brand. I highly recommend doing this. The next thing I would recommend doing is going out to Social Media because Aziz, part of this course. And as we build our our site, we're gonna create some social media accounts, and we're gonna promote, you know, build our brand that way. And it's a really good idea to go out there and see if somebody's already using that so we could go sties basket weaving tips. This is such an obscure thing that nobody's probably using it, but it's again. It's it's good to check. You just never know. You know, you could go out to Twitter and search no results, so that was kind of an extreme example. But I think you get the idea. The point is to just just do some basic due diligence, you know, so you don't get into trouble down the road, and that's that's a very good idea. So I hope this was useful for you. I'll see you in the next video 4. Domain Research: got a few websites up. We're gonna go through here. We just want to do some quick research. If we know exactly what our domain is, it's gonna be easy. But maybe we don't. Maybe we want to research a few ideas, see what's available, and I'm gonna show you a few good resource is to do that now, in the end, ultimately, when we figure out what domain we want, we figure out that it's available. We're gonna use Go Daddy to buy it. So this is actually where we're gonna end up when we go to buy a domain. Um, and I wanted to show you that to begin with, but for now we want to do a little bit of research. So the first site is a site called Name Mesh and its name mesh dot com, which want to do is you want to your into your primary key word if it's too. So if it's two key words, you would actually enter those with no spaces and I'll show you why. So we're gonna use the basket weaving example. I'm in her basket, weaving all together. It's going to return a list of results and give you ideas on some of the common ones that are available. Like I said, I I highly recommend dot com. If it's available dot Net would be a second choice and that warg would be probably your last choice. Does dot org's typically reserved for organizations or nonprofits, but you could possibly use it. But this tool, it gives you some some ideas. It just adds on Cem some words and letters to basket weaving, you know, Go basket weaving dot com max basket weaving dot com basket weaving online dot com That's what that might be a good one. He go over here on this side and kind of had some letters. You know, the basket weaving, and it's going to give you all kinds of different ideas on these are all the domains that are available now. I recommend we go back to go daddy on. I've got links to do this to buy your domain There, I would buy the domain through Go. Daddy would not click through and buy a domain from one of these sites. This is just a tool to kind of help you see what's available, so if you see anything you like you could write it down as part of the 10 that I recommend all them. Although on this one, all of those air gonna be available, I would still write down 10 and you can sit there and you can, you know, you can look through your list, maybe get if you can't decide, maybe ask a friend or ask a family member what they think. And so that way you get a list of choices. This next one is panna. Be penalty dot com. We would do the same thing. We would enter our keyword altogether and click on Search, and it's gonna get a kind of do the same thing that's gonna go through what? It's gonna give you some ideas. It's gonna add some letters and words and, you know, give you some different ideas on what's available. Uh, so you could come up with some pretty unique ideas on here, and the last resource I want to show you is thesaurus dot com, part of dictionary dot com. It's gonna give you synonyms for words, and if there's a part of a domain you like, but it's taken, you know, we could search for similar words. So, you know, take basket weaving tips dot com, for example. Let's say that's taken so we could search for tips and we could get some synonyms for that . So I said, a basket weaving tips. Maybe we could say, you know, basket weaving hints or basket leaving clues or basket weaving, weaving knowledge, you know. So then you could take those. Plug those in and see if those air available so those air like a sentence or just a few tools you can use for research. So the last thing you want to do here is you want to go out to I didn't have it pulled up. You want to go out to archive dot org's. Once you think you find a domain, you want to do a quick search and see if there's any history on that domain. Because if if the domains available, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's never been used, and you want to make sure that you check the history on it to find out if you know there's ever been anything questionable illegal, you know, unethical, any any type of site that you know, Google may have de indexed in the past or has problems. You want to make sure you check it out. So let's say we have found basket weaving dot com and it was available, which it's not, but we'll use as an example because there's probably history on it. So you would enter that. And what does TOOL does this archive Internet archive it? It's gone back, and it's all the major dates where the site has changed. It's archived. It doesn't do this for every side, but it does it for as many sites. Is it confined? So this one goes all the way back to 1998 so we can click on that click on one of these dates and you can see this is probably about when the site started. Uh, you know, you can see what it looks like. What you want to do is you want you want to scan through. You want to go through each of these. You don't necessarily have to get through everyone, but you want to make sure that there's just nothing nothing questionable on here. A lot of people what Internet marketers will buy a domain and you use it for back linking or throw something questionable on it. And Google, you know, Google either D index, that are, you know, devalue it. And you don't want to buy any domain that has a bad history on It's like buying a car, you know, you want to research it. So if you come up with a unique enough domain, you know, I would still plug it in here. And if nothing pops up, then you know you're fine. It's probably knew it's never been used, but it's always a good idea to check this. And another last thing you want to check is due that trademark search. So we did in the branding section just just to cover your bases and make sure that nobody has that thing trademarked are copyrighted. So those are the best tools you use for domain research that are quick and easy. And I'm gonna go back to go Daddy here. And then on the next video, I'm gonna show you how to buy a domain, how you know how to go through the process and get it set up. So we'll see in the next video 5. Buying a Domain: All right, so we're back on go, Daddy. And at this point, we should be ready to buy a domain. Now, we went to the last video on domain research, and we should be pretty confident at this point that we're ready to buy domain. These are the questions that you need to make sure that you can answer Teoh. Make sure 100% that you're ready to go. Make sure that you've checked for copyright and trademarks, And then the next question would be Is this domain gonna work for branding? So whether it be for your company, your company name or an appropriate domain name for Internet or affiliate marketing that matches keywords and that's gonna be relevant to the type of product or or hobby or service that you're gonna be promoting. And then the last thing to answer is, is it memorable? And is it gonna be easy to type in as we talked about? We don't want a domain that super long, and we don't We don't. We want to try to avoid a domain that has hyphens in it. So if you can answer yes to those questions at this point, you're probably ready to go ahead and buy a domain. So let's get started. Let's let's go through the process and see how you buy a domain on go, Daddy. Now, as I mentioned before, you can use the link that I have provided This is going to give you should give you a discount. So when we go to this process and look, we're probably going to be looking at full price. If you use the link that I give you, you're gonna get a coupon and you're gonna get a discount. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna look at the website planned questionnaire that we filled out before And remember this We answer these questions and I took some ideas from the domain research video and I went ahead and plug him in down here as some domain ideas. So at this point, we're ready to buy a domain we probably have. We've probably picked one of these that, you know we feel is the best. And that is our is our top choice. Let's say, for example, that we decided we wanted to use basket weaving. Just basket weaving dot com as our main choice and I'm gonna show you what happens here. This is this is ah, a little more general and more common, More common meaning. It's not as long, um, this would be preferable. But the problem with that is a lot of times the shorter the domain and the more common it is Ah, a lot of times it's gonna be taken, and that's why we have all these choices on here. But to start with, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna go ahead and try it. So let's go ahead and plug in basket weaving dot com and click on Search Domain. Now you'll see that it returns and and go, go Daddy's telling you that this has been taken so somebody else what that means that somebody else has this domain reserved and they have control of it, so there's no way that we can reserve it. It's not available. So what go Daddy's gonna do is they're gonna give you some other options and these air some lesser known extensions or so less common extensions. These are all available, but none of these air looking attractive. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna try another one. We're gonna go back to our sheet and let's say that you know they are Our next choice would be basket weaving tips because that kind of matches some of the key words we were talking about, Uh, when we did the research before, you know, we think that that would be a good brand are a good way to brand it to have a basket weaving tips. Blawg. So let's go ahead and go back and let's try basket weaving tips and see if that's available . So we go ahead and plug that in and I'm gonna click on search again. Okay, so that one is available. So what we want to do at this point is we want to click on Select. It's selected. Now we want to go ahead and continue to cart, so we're gonna click this button up here. Now, as you check out go, Daddy's going to try to sell you all this other stuff, and this is where it can get a little bit confusing. We do not want any of this at this point, so protect my personal information. No thanks. That would be domain privacy, which we're not gonna talk about, but in this case, it's not necessary. They're gonna try to sell you a website builder and hosting. You can do this as an option for hosting, but I do not recommend it. Um, I recommend that you keep your domain in your hosting separate, so we're gonna skip that. Uh, this is kind of silly, actually. Um, it's an ad. I it looks like it's ah, it's just going to set up a email address for you. And that's something we'll do on her own in a later video. And then it's also giving you the option to get office 3 65 online and some other tools. We don't want that setting up a secure certificate for your site. No thanks to all of that. And what we want to do next is click on, continue to cart. Okay, so it's pulled up the next page and usually by default, what it does, is it it? It defaults to two years as faras reserving the domain. Um, you can go ahead and pay, you know, for two years or three years or five years. I typically will start with one year because I don't know. You know, I know I'm gonna be serious about the Web site, but I just don't know how it's going to turn out, And I don't want oh, over invest in it. So I'll just start with a year. And as you go to renew the next time, you can always you know, once once your websites going good and you're 100% sure that it's gonna be around for a while, you could go ahead and extend that out. S I would just start, you know, at one year. And then yes, we're gonna keep our personal information public. We're not gonna do that domain privacy at this time. Uh, go. Daddy's gonna try to sell you some extra stuff, some extra extensions that we don't want again. They're going to try to sell you other services for search engine optimization. And, sir, uh, search engine visibility, and we don't want that. So at this point, we've got everything we need. We would go ahead and click on, proceed to check out. Now, at this point, if you've never use go, Daddy, you would want to go ahead and click on the new customers tab. Click continue and you would fill this out and then you would click Continue again and you would be taken to the page to confirm before your you finally place the order. Um, I have a good daddy account, So if you have a go daddy account already, what she would do is you had any information here. I'm gonna go and enter this information now, since I have an account, and then I will pause the video and show you what it looks like right before you check out . Okay, so now I am at the 1,000,000,000 payment confirmation page. So either you set up a new account and your to this point or you've logged into an existing account and your to this point. So all it's gonna do is gonna verify your billing information, and it's gonna verify your preferred payment method. You can use a credit card. You can use paper how you can use a checking account. You can use a credit debit prepaid card. Um, any of those air options. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna verify that all looks correct. And then you have to check this box over here that says I agree to the following and at this point to finish it off, You go ahead and place your order. In that point, you would go and buy your domain. Now, as I mentioned before, you know, this is full retail price right here. If you use the link that I give you, you can get it. You should be able to get a discount on that. So go ahead and go that route. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in place the order now and then. Ah, we have our domain and we can get started setting things up.