Author: jlouis

If you are looking to start a website for affiliate marketing, then the first thing you need to do is select an appropriate domain name for your site. In this article, we will go over exactly how to select the best domain name possible for your affiliate marketing goals.

How do you choose the best domain name for affiliate marketing? There is a simple 5 step process to ensuring you select the best domain name possible for your affiliate marketing website, every single time.

1. Research & Pick the Right Niche
2. Start with Your Goals in Mind
3. Understand the Principles of Great Domain
4. Research & Find Your Perfect Domain
5. Secure It Quickly, When You Find It

In the remainder of this article, we will break down these 5 simple steps to picking a great domain name for your affiliate marketing site so you can take action today, and more importantly be confident in your decision.

If you already, have your affiliate niche in mind and want to find domain name availability,  us our free name generator tool here. 

Continue reading to learn the process in more detail, as well as uncovering simple FREE tools to make the process easier, faster, and less expensive…

Step 1: Research & Select The Best Affiliate Marketing Niche

If you’ve already decided on a niche then you can skip to, step 2 in the process.

But, in case you are still on the fence about which niche to go into then you will want to pay close attention to this step.  I’ve started a lot of websites over the years.

Some have been successful, some less so, and others have completely flopped.  The goal of this section is to help you better understand what makes a good niche so you don’t repeat my mistakes. 

Don’t get me wrong you can be successful in any niche, but some are definitely harder than others.  Niche selection can be an entire course or at least a significant number of lessons, but I want to give you the nuts and bolts in this article, so we can move on to your question about picking the best domain for your affiliate marketing site. 

But remember, “A bad idea with a great domain, still has a better chance of failing than the other way around. “

Understand The Competition

If you’ve been researching affiliate marketing for any length of time, then you will know that there are some conflicting suggestions when it comes to niche selection. 

But here is the long and short of it.  The less competition, the easier it will be to stick out from the crowd and get traffic.  This is true for Free organic SEO traffic, or even for paid traffic. The less competition for paid traffic, the less you will have to pay for it. 

So, whether you plan on taking an SEO approach or paid traffic, or a combo of both, realize the less competition you have the easier it will be to gain traction in the market. 

There is another side of the coin though that you want to be aware of.  Make sure you aren’t picking a niche that is so obscure that no one is looking for it, or that there is no way to monetize it.  We will get into that monetization later.

Use your common sense when it comes to deciding on the competitiveness of a niche.  Most of the time that won’t let you down. 

But, I also promised you that you would discover some great FREE tools throughout this article to make the process easier and cheaper.  These are tools I use myself. 

Free Tools for assessing the competition of your affiliate niche:

UberSuggest.io

This is a free SEO tool that Neil Patel recently purchased. It allows you to do keyword analysis, competitor site analysis, and a whole lot more. Remember that keyword tools don’t have exact data from google, so when it comes to keyword volumes and competitiveness scores take them with a grain of salt.  But, this can help give you some data to either solidify or question your initial niche ideas. 

Google Adwords Key Word Planner

This tool is free and comes right from Google, it’s meant to be used to figure out advertising keywords and potential budgets. To get more exact volume numbers you need to have an active campaign, but you can get an idea about avg CPC using this tool. That stands for the Average Cost Per Click if you were going to bid on these terms in google.  The higher the CPC the more competitive the term usually is.  It also, usually means there is more money to be made with that market, so take that into consideration as well.

Sorry, to go so long on competition but I really wanted to make sure you had the bases to make the right choice for your next site. 

Google Trends

This is another free tool that is an easy way to see the historical trends of a topic. You can see if its seasonal, consistent, or on the upswing.  You can also compare two different topics to see how they compare relatively in terms of search interest.

Personal Interest/Knowledge

The next thing you should gage when it comes to picking a niche is your level of personal interest and knowledge or lack thereof.  If you are an expert in a particular niche or have a strong affinity for it.  Creating content for it will be much easier, and cheaper since you can easily do it yourself. 

Now, if budget is not a constraint and you plan on outsourcing everything then you don’t need personal knowledge or interest.  But where people go wrong is that they don’t even take the time to learn about the niche enough to know what the potential customers care about. 

“If you know what a customer needs, has problems with, or what they desire it will be much easier for you to position solutions to them in the form of affiliate products.  So, keep that in mind!”

Understand the Monetization Options

This seems obvious but trust me it is a step that a lot of people gloss over. I’ve been guilty of starting sites early on that interested me, without having enough foresight to investigate what the monetization options look like. 

There is nothing worse than putting in a ton of time and effort building out content, having it rank and get traffic, only to be left scrambling for affiliate offers that convert and make money. 

So, don’t skip this step.  Make sure you always vet your affiliate niche idea based on, the affiliate options you have.

Step 2: Start With The End Goal In Mind

You probably already got the sense from step #1 that when it comes to picking the right domain for your affiliate site and building out one that is successful starts with planning.

So, for step 2 take your planning to the next level.  Layout exactly what you want to accomplish with your affiliate site before you purchase a domain. Here are some of the questions you want to answer for yourself.

1. 1. What does your perfect customer avatar look like?
   2. What are some problems they need help solving?
   3. What value do you want to provide to the market?
   4. What is the best way for you to provide that value?
   5. Are there any leaders in your niche? How can you emulate/improve upon them?
   6. What is the sales process for your affiliate offer? Low Ticket vs High Ticket Affiliate Offer
   7. What does success look like? Write down your goals?
      1. Traffic
      2. Revenue

Once you have Steps 1 & 2 complete, you can now move on to step 3.

Step 3: Principles Of A Great Domain

Here are the general rules for picking the best domain name for your affiliate marketing website. Read these over and understand them. Also, understand that they are guidelines, and you won’t necessarily find a domain that meets all these characteristics.

If you do, grab it!

But, follow these principles and you will end up with a winning domain name every time.

Keyword Rich Domains

This is something that you will also hear different advice on. The days of just buying a keyword-stuffed domain and ranking is over, no doubt.  However, keyword-rich domains with quality content still rank well.  So, if you can find a keyword-rich domain then grabbing it can help. 

This is another example of doing the research in step 1 and 2.  If you know your market, if you’ve plugged it into Google’s keyword tool, you will know which terms have higher traffic. If you understand your perfect customer and what they are looking for, what they care about.  You will have insight into keywords that could have a lot of potential traffic, but more importantly, resonate with your desired website visitors.

Shorter is Better

Shorter domains are generally more valuable.  Just try to find single word domains. They cost a pretty premium as you have to buy them from someone else. 99.9% of the time. In general, the shorter the domain the easier it is for users. So, keep it short when possible.

Make It Easy To Spell

This goes along with number 2. But the easier to spell the better. This is really important especially when your domain is given out verbally.  You don’t want to pick words with multiple spellings or something that is easily misspelled. Anything that can cause confusion is a chance for a lost visitor.

Avoid Hyphens

Don’t use hyphens.  They typically aren’t looked on as trustworthy by visitors.  When is the last time you visited a well-known company and their domain name had a hyphen in it? Think about it. Never.  So, do yourself a favor. Avoid hyphenated domain names.

Stick to Top Level Extensions

There are thousands of extensions out there. But the main top-level domains are still your best bet for credibility and love from the search engines.  So, if you can stick to the, .com, .net, .org, extensions of the world.

Make it Easy Say

Again, you want word of mouth for your website. Or you may be doing some video or podcast marketing. The last thing you want is a domain that people can’t pronounce. So, pick a domain that is easy to read and say.

Think About Your Desired Brand

Know what you want your site’s brand to be.  This will be important as you pick the domain name and logo.  Word choice can be subtle but have a big impact on your over brand. So, consider this before you pick your domain.

Check Social Media Name Availability

This is often overlooked. But if you want to ensure brand continuity check social media platforms for corresponding name availability.  You don’t need to have your name available on every social media network. But if you are between two different domain names where everything else is equal, and one has more availability on social networks. Then go for that one. In the next session, we will tell you about our FREE name generator tool, which will also find check your social media names.

Keep The Future Growth In Mind

Finally, keep your long-term growth plans in mind.  If you plan on expanding to adjacent topics or products, make sure you pick a name that isn’t too narrow.  The last thing you want is a domain name like SquareGreenPlanters.com if you are planning on covering other planters, or even better, other garden tools. Ok, so that was kind of a corny example, but hopefully, it hit home.

Avoid Trademarks

You definitely want to avoid using trademarks in your domain. This may be tempting. Say you find a great piece of software that you want to be an affiliate for, and you plug in “Softwarename” Review in our name generator tool. There is a good chance our software will find an available domain for you. But, don’t use it! While the domain may be keyword rich and really tempting. You don’t want to put yourself in a position to receive a cease and desist letter from a corporate lawyer promising to sue you if you don’t take it down.  This happened to me a long time ago, and honestly, it wasn’t even done on purpose.  But the company that had its trademark well established had its name in my domain. So, I had to rebrand the entire website and move it to another domain.  Just do yourself a favor and avoid it. Pick another great domain our tool spits out to you.

Step 4: Research & Find The Actual Domain Name

Now that you know how to set yourself up for success when picking a domain name, and what to look for in a winning domain.

It’s time to find an available domain that meets all the parameters we talked about above. 

The good news is while more and more domains are registered every day. It’s never been easier to find a great domain.

We recommend using a domain name generator, our name generator to be exact: NamingGenerator.com.

Here is how NamingGenerator.com can help you find the perfect domain name. 

• You just feed it a seed word or two and our FREE tool will instantly offer up hundreds of available domain names. Saving you hours of time manually searching for these domains yourself.
• Our naming tool will also allow you to instantly search social media networks for the corresponding availability.

Our Free Software doesn’t stop there.  Read the benefits of securing your new domain through our free tool and how it can help you save money and get FREE Domain Logo!

Step 5: Secure it Quickly

Thousands of domains are registered every day, so you want to snap up a domain quickly once you find it. 

So, once you find a great domain using our FREE NamingGenerator.com tool. We take it to the next level by:

• We provide the latest discounted offers from the top hosting companies on the planet. This will let you get industry-leading hosting at a discounted price, and a lot of times you’ll even get the domain registered for FREE!
• We are giving a huge bonus to users that choose to get their domain through one of our affiliate offers.  We are going to provide you with a FREE professionally Designed Logo for your new website!
• Plus, we are giving you’re a couple of bonuses:
  • E-book: 27 FREE website tools that you must have to save money and time!
  • FREE course on how to launch a successful affiliate site.

So, if you are ready to find and reserve your perfect affiliate marketing domain, visit our FREE Name Generator here.