Buy, Purchase, Register, Reserve, and Search For Cheap Domain Names

Top notch, quality domain names are a must have these days for anyone looking to do business online. Having a good, recognizable domain name not only increases and improves brand awareness, but helps with driving traffic to the business by making the website search engine friendly. The bottom line is, if you want to sell stuff online - be it a product, service, or your own brand - you'll need web presence, and the best way to establish your web presence is with a recognizable domain name. There are many choices out there for domain name registration, and it's not always clear what the best choices are. You don't necessarily just want a cheap option, but you also want feature full services with reliability, a good user interface, and great customer support.

Another issue people often have to deal with when trying to buy and register domain names is coming up with a name in the first place. This takes a bit more creativity, but there are tools out there that can help the average person use sophisticated software techniques to generate and seek out short, concise, recognizable domain names, or even capitalize on previously-registered domain names that are about to expire. That way, you can be opportunistic and use an established domain name and build off of that traffic and brand recognition. This guide will help you determine and find a good domain name and secure the best service provider for registering the domain name at a cheap price, while providing top-notch support. Shall we get started?

A lot of companies and brands struggle with coming up with a good domain name. The ideal domain name should be short (ideally 10 characters or less), consist of easy to spell or recognizable English words, and be memorable. You don't necessarily have to grab a word or phrase that wholly captures your company or product. For example, Google did just fine with their name, and they didn't need to go with search.com. Lots of the best online brands in the world have made-up words, like Google and Yahoo. All it takes is creativity and a lot of good marketing.

Another thing to remember is that although .com domain names still reign supreme in the land of domain names, you can get creative and use some of the less sought after top-level domains (TLD). Some of the popular ones, especially in the technology space, include .fm, and .ly. The country of Colombia recently began offering domain names for the .co TLD, which probably attracted a land rush of domain name speculators as well.

There are also quite a few tools out there that will help you on your quest to finding and coming up with the best possible domain name for your business. Some of the methods use advanced software approaches to mine through lists of recently expired or about to expire domain names, and pick out the ones with the most potential. Other tools can help you generate variants on a phrase or keyword you want in your domain name, often uncovering hidden gems with different permutation of letters, words, or even different TLDs altogether in order to arrive at a great domain name that fits your needs.

Some of these tools include:

• http://www.domai.nr
• http://domaintyper.com
• http://www.bustaname.com

There is a plethora of cheap domain name registration services. Many of these companies have been around since the hey day of the Internet. The trick is to navigate the rough waters of domain name registration and actually get to the cream of the crop. GoDaddy.com is probably the indisputable king of cheap domain name registrars, as the company is most famous for their controversial ads starring scantily-clad women that often appear during Super Bowls. You can usually register domain names for about $10 a pop at GoDaddy, and they often have promotional deals. Simply do a web search for "GoDaddy coupon" and you should be able to easily find a GoDaddy coupon promo code that knocks the price down to about $7.

The downside with GoDaddy is their crufty, aged interface for managing domains. The interface is bulky, hard to use, and looks like it was designed in the late 1990s. However, they're probably still your best bang for the buck. If all you're looking for in a service is cheap domain name registration, then GoDaddy is the way to go. For all other services like hosting, email, etc, you can find other, much higher caliber companies to fill the void.

Another registrar is Domains In Seconds, which was featured as a recommended tool in the book The 4-Hour Workweek. The book talks about ways to go about doing market testing for products online, and one method is to put together quick, lightweight websites to gauge consumer interest. The first step for this is to get a domain name, and the author himself has used the Domains In Seconds service to register over a hundred different domains.

Some other good domain name registering services that have been recommended by others include Joker.com and NameCheap.com. Both of these services provide competitive rates that are on par with GoDaddy.

Sometimes, you come across an idea for a domain name that's available, but you don't quite know what to do with it yet. That's no problem, since many of the domain registering services discussed earlier allow you to reserve and purchase the domain, and simply "park" it. That is, a placeholder web page will be created to indicate that the domain name is registered, but you don't actually need to go through with finding a hosting service for it yet. You can park the domain name indefinitely.

In fact, you can even make some easy money on a parked domain. Google Adsense is an advertising program that has a feature for domain name owners to display ads for parked domains, then make money off of clicks on those ads when users visit the domain.

So what are you waiting for? If you have an idea for domain name, go out there and reserve it today! Good domain names are hard to come by, and these days it costs less than a big meal at McDonald's to reserve a domain name. Who knows, it could become a big money maker!