For the purpose of this part of the series I’m going to make an assumption - that you’ve chosen to go with a stand alone blog platform and that the name of your blog will be the same as your domain name. If one or both of those is incorrect than not all of what follows will apply to you.

Choosing A Domain Name

There have been millions of words written about what makes up a good domain name - much of it conflicting. For our purposes we are going to simplify the process as much as possible and consider two options.

Keyword based domains names - a keyword based domain name, as you have probably already figured out, is one that includes the keyword or keywords related to what you sell and what, presumably, your blog will be about. If you primarily sell widgets on ebay then a blog name of Widgets Galore and a domain name of widgetsgalore.com would be an example of a keyword based domain name.

Brandable domains - while a brandable domain may contain a keyword, more than likely it will consist of a unique name that people can easily remember and will associate exclusively with you and your business. An example of a brandable domain would the theauctionrebel.com.

Since the purpose of the blog I’m building here is to promote and market the auctions and my eBay store items under my paperpleasures46 eBay ID I will be opting for a domain name that is more brandable than one containing keywords. In light of that, the name of the blog will be Paper Pleasures 46 and I will register the domain name paperpleasures46.com.

Registering A Domain Name

There are many different domain registration services on the Net. All are pretty much the same with the primary differences being the registration fee they charge and their reliability. I registered the domain name for this new blog with 000domains.com. I chose them simply because I have been using them to register domain names for many years and they’ve proven to be extremely reliable and are reasonably priced at $13.50 for one year.

There are services that are cheaper by a few dollars so if cost is a factor I’d suggest you Google “domain registration service” and you will find hundreds of other options. Before making a decision I recommend you do two things:

• Make sure the service you choose automatically notifies you when your domain name is about to expire. Some don’t do this and if your registration expires without you realizing it you can end up with some huge headaches.
• Once you have chosen a likely candidate Google the name of the service and spend a little time reading what’s been said about them recently on discussion forums targeted at web builders. Some of the cheaper services provide good service when they first start-up, but as time passes, people begin having problems with them. If others are having problems with a service, the chances are you will too. This way you can avoid some instant headaches.

Choosing A Hosting Service

If there’s one thing there are more of than domain registration services, it’s hosting services. They range from atrociously bad to excellent. Because of that, if you’ve chosen to use WordPress as a blogging platform I’m going to highly recommend that you use WebbleYou.com. WebbleYou specializes in hosting WordPress blogs. All my other blogs are hosted with them and that’s where Paper Pleasures 46 will be hosted also. The cost is $4.00 a month which is very reasonable.

WebbleYou is an excellent service with outstanding up-time. In addition, Jason installs the latest version of WordPress and set up whatever email addresses you want so that you won’t have to. In addition, if you have any problem or questions he responds quickly and will walk you through things if needed. I’m not an affiliate of WebbleYou but I’d recommend them without hesitation to anyone using WordPress.

If you choose to look at other hosting services do two things before making a final decision:

• Make sure the hosting company offers Fantastico as part of their control panel. Fantastico allows you to install WordPress with just a few easy clicks
• Once you have selected a likely candidate Google the name of the hosting company and check them out similar to what was recommended above for a likely looking domain registry company

Tomorrow we will look at choosing a template for your blog and begin to look at how to make it attractive to the search engines.

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