Blogging Guide: How to Choose A Domain Name for Your Blog

Blogging Guide: How to Choose A Domain Name for Your Blog

These days it’s pretty difficult to find an effective domain name for your blog. With so many blogs online the good domain names have disappeared! But, here is a helpful guide about how to choose an effective domain name for your blog.

If you’ve already chosen a blog niche or have some blog name ideas and know what topics you’ll cover, this guide will help you to find a good and effective blog domain name.

  1. The Benefits of Your Blog

In the URL you need to explain what your audience will get out of your blog. For example, howtohockey.com, freelancing.com, and howtoloseweight.com.

To find the benefits of your domain name, ask yourself what readers will get out of your content.

  1. Target Audience of Your Blog

This idea is based on the target audience your blog is meant to serve. So, copyblogger.com is for copywriters and bloggers, campergroove.com is for campers, Fitnessnews.com is for fitness, etc.

  1. The Topic of Your Blog

This idea uses the topic of your blog as the URL, so readers will know what you’re writing about when they see it. For example, zenhabits.com, insightfulmanager.com, goodfoodrunning.com, etc.

Warning: Avoid being too cute or clever when trying to put your topic into the domain name. Being clever is the enemy of domain names for blogs. They’ll confuse your readers to the point where they’ll not stay long on your site. And a high bounce rate will impact your blog SEO.

  1. Use Your Name

You can also use your name in your domain, which can be good to demonstrate your thought leadership on the topic. For example, LilachBullock.com, or NeilPatel.com. Their names are their brands, and so people know what they’re going to get when they type in the URL.

  1. What You’re Doing With Your Blog

This idea flips the topic around to be about what you’re doing as a blogger, rather than what your audience is doing or wanting to learn how to do. For example, Foundr.com tells the stories of founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners. MakingSenseofCents.com tells stories about personal finance.

  1. Use a Domain Name Generator – Easy Solution

If you have a list of keywords, topics, or general ideas, but you’re still struggling to come up with a good domain name, you should try a blog domain name generator.

Just type in a few words into the domain name search tool and see what domain name suggestions pop out. Try searching on your hobbies, your favorite sports, the types of books you like to read, or the food you like to eat.

Important Tip. There are a few things you need to avoid

What to Avoid for Your Blog Name

Longer than 20 characters. Anything longer than that is hard to remember and hard to type and will lose blog visitors, traffic, and search engine results.

Include confusing letter combinations. A domain name with multiple letter combinations is harder to type. You’ll lose a lot of traffic because people will either misspell your domain, or they’ll forget a letter and get redirected to someone else’s site.

Hard to pronounce. Your domain should always be easy to say and write since you’ll never know when you’ll be asked to share it live.

Mention brand or trademarked names. Your domain name should be unique to you, even if you’re talking about a brand or trademarked name. The whole point of a trademark is to protect it from illegal use, so it doesn’t harm their reputation.

Unless you want to spend all of your blog’s income on lawyers to fight any brand infringement lawsuits, it’s best to avoid them entirely.

Use obscure abbreviations. It can be tempting to include abbreviations in your domain name, especially to get under that 15 character limit. But when you use them, you might rule out beginners that don’t understand the term you’re abbreviating.

Include hyphens. Hyphens are a big risk because any similar site without the hyphens will probably get all of your traffic. Why? Because people forget to add the hyphens when they type the URL in their web browsers. So, if your site is herb-gardeners.com and there’s already a site called herbgardeners.com, guess which one they’ll visit first? Not yours.

Have too many keywords. Domains that are “keyword-rich” or “keyword-targeted” can be viewed negatively by search engines. Use only obvious keywords, if you must, but generally speaking, try to avoid more than two.

Are too narrow in focus. While your domain name should be narrow enough to be unique and gain good traffic, it should leave you room to expand. Your domain will earn SEO love over time as it builds links and authority, so you’ll want to keep using it.

A flexible domain will allow you to do this.

Finally, it’s time to run your choice through a blog domain name checker to make sure it’s available. Domain registrars can help you with this. Run through your shortlist on the registrar to see which ones are available

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