So you want to start a blog.

You may already know what you want to blog about. If not, you should be resolved to grabbing yourself a yourname.com domain name and blogging about everything and anything that comes to mind. The act of blogging itself will give you direction.

To be honest, grabbing a yourname.com domain is the best advice I can give to any beginner blogger, whether they know what they want to blog about or not. Why? Because it’s zero hassle and gives you total freedom.

Take chrisguillebeau.com for example. His domain name is his name, but that hasn’t stopped him from branding his website as The Art of Non-Conformity and becoming a New York Times bestselling author and the founder of the World Domination Summit – a 3,000 strong conference held every year in Portland, Oregon.

And if your firstnamelastname.com domain is already taken, there are lots of alternatives you can try.

However, if you want to pick something a little more original for your blog’s domain name, keep reading.

The Fundamentals of Choosing a Domain Name For Your Blog

Let’s start with the fundamentals. Your domain name should be:

• Short (ideally no more than three words of short to medium length)
• Unique, memorable and catchy
• Easy to pronounce
• Easy to spell
• Not too similar to any competing domain names
• Not a violation of another site’s/company’s trademark

For those last two, a simple Google search should reveal if you’ve chosen something too similar to an entity that already exists. Don’t worry about this too much – even if your name does potentially infringe on an existing brand, the worst that could happen is you get a letter from a lawyer asking you to use a different domain name. (Please note that I say this without any legal qualifications; if you are at all concerned you should seek proper legal advice.)

Ideally, you won’t use numbers in your domain, because when someone tells them the domain, they don’t know whether to spell out the number or not (e.g. three or 3?).

Along the same lines, you shouldn’t use hyphens in domains. These can easily confuse people, which leads to them never actually seeing your site.

On the assumption that you’re not willing to shell out big bucks for a domain name, anything remotely obvious and/or simple (think cheese.com or football.com) won’t be available. This applies to dot coms (.com) primarily, but also to dot nets (.net) and dot orgs (.org). However, there are a secondary layer of less ‘popular’ domain extensions (that’s the bit after the dot) that you can explore; we’ll cover those next.

Confused about all this talk of dot coms and dot nets? They’re known as domain extensions, and you can learn all about them here.

And how do you find out if a domain name has been taken, I hear you ask? Simple: use this tool.

Creating a ‘Discoverable’ Domain

Discoverable domain names are typically descriptive of what you can expect from the site.

They’ll include keywords that people might use on search engines, thus giving you a good chance of your website being listed.

So, if you wrote about dog training, you would ideally have the dogtraining.com domain. If you wrote about recipes, you would ideally have recipes.com.

There’s just one problem: the vast majority of discoverable domain names are already taken. It’s very difficult to find them. (I was amazed to find that beginnerblogging.net was still available.)

I don’t want to put you off finding a discoverable domain name, but securing a good one will probably take a lot of time, effort and luck, with no guarantees. The plus side is that you might get a boost in search engine rankings, thus leading to more traffic; but again, there are no guarantees.

Creating a Brand Name Domain

A brand name domain is essentially something made up.

I’m talking about the likes of pinterest.com, reddit.com, mashable.com, zappos.com, and so on. By the very fact that you’re making a word up, it’s very unlikely to be taken as a domain name. This method also gives you the opportunity to think of something unique, catchy and memorable, which is not always possible with a keyword-based domain name like origamipapersupplies.com (yawn).

Brand names don’t have to be that difficult to come up with. You have two broad options:

1. Come up with something completely random (like hiaruken.com – I just thought that up on the spot).
2. Come up with something that alludes to your topic in some way.

Pinterest.com is a good example of option two – in fact, it’s a portmanteau of two words: “pin” and “interest.” And guess what you do on Pinterest? You “pin” your “interests” on virtual pinboards.

Say you’re an adventure travel blogger. Your domain name could be adventravel.com. (At the time of writing, the .com is taken but the .net is not, so you could grab it!)

Continuing along the lines of allusion, you could use imagery to relate to your topic. A favorite example of mine is extrapackofpeanuts.com, which covers ‘travel hacking’ (reducing the cost of travel). The ‘extra pack of peanuts’ is a nice metaphor for getting more for less when traveling. I’ll forgive the rather wordy domain name because it’s so catchy.

Alternatively, you could choose a more direct and less abstract branding route. Say for example you want to create a blog that publishes children’s stories based around an alpaca called Banto (yep – this is the kind of thing that goes on in my head). Your domain could be storieswithbanto.com or bantothealpaca.com.

Domains Don’t Have to Be Forever

A good domain name is important, but no domain name has to be permanent.

You can always re-brand. Lots of successful websites have done just that – i.e. changed their name entirely.

Please let that fact give you comfort; don’t stress out too much over your domain name! With a new one costing from around $10, you’re hardly going to be breaking the bank if you change your mind.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to grab your domain! Click here to get started. And if you’re not ready yet – for whatever reason – voice your concerns in the comments section below or get in touch.