We just launched our brand new https://shop.bzfurfur.com and we’ve learned a lot in the process. We are launching this five-part weekly series, every Tuesday starting March 21, as a way to help other makers on a similar journey.
You are a maker. That is what you do and you do it well. Now you want to sell what you make. You can sell locally but you want to get your product in front of as many people as possible. Sites like Etsy and Amazon do a great job of allowing you to sell your products to a worldwide audience but not without a price. Fees for these sites can be steep and the competition is fierce. Not to mention they change their terms of service or fees at their discretion. If that is your home base for all your sales you have nothing to fall back on. In this five-part series, we are going to go over the basics of building a website.
Securing a Domain Name
The first thing to think about is the Domain Name. A domain name is what someone types into the browser to get to your site (e.g. www.google.com). Your domain name should align with your brand’s identity. Think about some of the sites that you frequent regularly. You can often guess the domain name without even looking it up: amazon.com, etsy.com, ebay.com. I
f you run a company called Gift’s by Jane you don’t want your domain name to be something completely out of the left field like pyromania.com. Herein may lie a challenge. The internet has been growing for 30 years and people have been snatching up a lot of the good domain names so there is a good chance that the domain name for your business might not be available. And if it is it might be getting sold for an exorbitant amount of money (buying domain names cheap and reselling them at higher prices is a common money-making scheme). Don’t worry, though, there are options that can keep your budget under $20 per year.
Protips for Finding the Right Domain Name
- Look for a domain name that is similar to your business name if you can’t get it exactly. If giftsbyjane.com is already taken look for giftsbyjanellc.com or giftsbyjaneshop.com. With a little creativity, you can come up with a domain name that aligns with your brand but doesn’t cost you a small fortune
- Consider a different Top Level Domain (TLD). You may notice that not every website ends with .com. This is because, in 2012, they approved hundreds of new TLDs. TLDs are the suffix at the end of your domain. Previously .com was the only viable option for businesses but now you can use things like .io or .info. This gives you a cheap alternative like giftsbyjane.io that represents your brand. Unfortunately, not everyone knows that these other TLDs exist so you could lose business by people getting your domain name wrong.
Extra Bits and Bobs
There are plenty of companies that sell domain names and they’ll run you around $10-20 a year such as Namecheap, Google Domains, GoDaddy, just to name a few. You may want to hold off purchasing a domain until after our post next week on hosting solutions as you can usually get a domain when you buy your hosting package and having one service provider for both can be less of a hassle. A few things to think about:
- Companies will often try to upsell you additional, similar domains. Rarely is this necessary. Most of your traffic is likely going to come from organic search, targeting ads, email campaigns, etc (all of which we’ll talk about in later posts) which will all funnel traffic through one main domain.
- They will also probably try to upsell you on other products and services. Use discretion with these. The most common of these is some anonymity package that keeps your personal information secure. When you register a domain it will create a “Who Is” record which allows people to get the contact information of the person registered to the domain. This can lead to a lot of unsolicited calls. If keeping your information anonymous is important to you I would recommend getting this service.
- Put your domain on auto-renewal. The main reason is if you forget to renew your domain and it expires someone can swipe it up. If they do you are now stuck with the choice of either paying a premium price to get it back or rebranding with an entirely new domain.
Hopefully, this helps guide you in selecting the right domain. We’ll see you all next week when we discuss choosing a hosting provider.
Thank you for this well-researched and thorough article. The insights you’ve shared are incredibly valuable, and I’ll be referring back to this post often.