Get your own name to sell online

Domain registration is the process of getting the name you want registered so that everyone can find you on the Internet. If you're serious about doing business on the Internet, you need to have your own domain or address. Once it's registered, no one else can use it, assuming you continue to pay the annual registration fees.

Image does count!

By the way, with some of the free hosting services, you don't register your name. The hosting service gives you a name like abcsales.xxxhosting.com or xxxhosting.com/abcsales to use as your address. Don't do it! While it's cheap, it looks tacky and does not give your potential customers confidence that your business is real.

Consider This

Let's say you want the name abcsales.com as your domain. When you go to a registration site, the first thing that will be done is to verify that no one else has already selected abcsales.com as their domain. Only one abcsales.com can be registered.

What if abcsales.com is taken? The you can try abc-sales.com, or abcsales.net. If all those are taken, you might want to try sales-abc.com or salesatabc.com. The challenge is to make it easy for people to find you.

If your primary customers are coming from search engines, you can use virtually any name up to 64 letters and numbers, because your customer doesn't have to type in the name. All he has to do is click on a link that the search engine displays. This is also helpful for search engine positioning.

If you wind up registering a name like abc-sales-sells-anything-in-the-world.com, which will work great for search engines, you may also want to register a simpler name so that when people are sending you Email or just going to your site, they can type it easily. Something like abcs.com. makes it easy for people to get back to you once they've found you.

You MUST have your own Email address, Email Rant.

Keeping it legal--and safe

There are quite a number of companies that will handle handle your domain registration. Most of them charge $14.95 a year and more. Get your own domain name here! You can also sign up for hosting and Email as well.

Once you got your domain name, you need to get hosting and most hosting companies will help register your domain as well. Learn all about hosting.