Choosing a Home Based Business Domain

So you finally made the leap and decided you want to give a network marketing opportunity a try…now what?

Now I know that most network marketing opportunities give you a pre-generated, replicated website with a URL that looks something like youropportunity.com/12121212 and many of you will decide to promote that URL alone. That may be fine for some people but many prefer to create a brand for themselves; they may want to be more than just a number or series of characters. In fact, you may end up choosing to promote several URLs dedicated to your home based business opportunity. For instance, you may find that you want to start with two URLs to promote your opportunity right away; one URL to use as a redirect for the actual replicated opportunity page you are given and one URL to provide additional news and information about the opportunity and to act as a hub for your downline to be able to follow what you are doing to be successful. Now while simply registering 2 domains may initially sound easy, I think that this step would best benefit from a little forethought and planning. Why you ask? Well there are quite a few things you need to consider when choosing your domain. For instance, should your domain be:

Hyphenated or Not
Long or Short
Keyword or Brandable
Plurals, “The”, “My” & “Blog”
Which Dot Should You Go With
Use of Stop Words
Multiple Similar Domains

Hyphenated or Not

One common question that comes up often is with regards to whether or not one should utilize a hyphen(s) in their domain name…this most commonly occurs when you settle on a domain idea only to find that the domain in question is already taken. Of course as with anything there are a number of pros and cons to either decision.

Pro – The search engines are more readily able to identify the keywords you are trying to promote as they are broken up by hyphens.
Pro – Being that the non-hyphenated version is taken at least you still get a version of the domain you initially settled on.
Con – People WILL forget the hyphens (not ALL people obviously but some will). Imagine this…you know the website is HomeBasedBusinessOpportunity.com but can’t remember if it is Homebased-Business-Opportunity.com or Home-Based-Business-Opportunity.com. Anytime you use a hyphen in your URL there is a significant risk that you are handing prospects over to your competition for this reason alone.
Con – In some circles this could be considered spammy.

Long or Short

Another topic that is hotly debated is how long a domain name should be; currently domain names can be as long as 67 characters in length. In general most people agree (or would argue) that the shorter the domain name is, the better. One of the main reasons for this is that the longer the domain the more room for error when a prospective surfer is trying to type it in.

Shorter domains tend to appear more appealing to the eye in advertising (both online and offline). That being said, a short domain name is typically better than a long domain name as long as the domains name makes sense to the surfer and is memorable. Put yourself in a surfer’s shoes when making this determination. Would you more readily remember hbbo.com or homebasedbusinessopportunity.com? Of course shorter domains are also becoming increasingly difficult to acquire as many of the good ones have already been snapped up. Plus longer keywords might possibly fare better on certain search engine because of the weight they place on the keywords appearance in a domains name.

Keyword or Brandable

There have also been countless debates and discussions regarding whether or not you should choose a keyword domain or one that would be more memorable or brandable in the eyes of your readership. While both of these goals MAY be achieved with one URL many people will be left to chose one or the other.

Keyword domains utilize keywords that your site or blog is going to be about within the actual domain itself. For instance, if your home based business opportunity offers “light widgets” as their product a good keyword domain may be LightWidgets.com or LightWidgetsGuru.com. If lightwidgetguru.com was your domain you might further choose to have it redirected to your replicated page (as long as your TOS allows this). By doing this you would be able to create promotions and advertising utilizing LightWidgetsGuru.com as your URL as opposed to LightWidgetsEnterprises.com/12121212.

There are a couple of excellent reasons for having a keyword domain. First of all it readily communicates to the reader / surfer what they should expect to see when they get to your site. Secondly, the search engines take a good look at your domain name when they are choosing where to best index your site. Obviously if you are planning on mainly targeting search engine traffic this may be the way you want to go. Brandable domains are more about establishing your identity to your following. For instance, when asked about online auctions most people immediately think eBay, when talking about tissue paper most people refer to it as Kleenex even though Kleenex is just 1 BRAND of tissue paper (as is Soft ‘N White, Tisyu, & Blest). Good examples of a brandable URL include eBay.com, Digg.com, MySpace.com and FaceBook.com to name just a few. These types of sites or blogs would be ideally suited to creating and developing a community of loyal readers. Obviously these sites can also do well in the search engines depending on how they are laid out and the content that is developed for them; URLS are only one of the tools that the search engines use to determine a sites relevancy.