Selecting the Right Affiliate Marketing Domain for Your Niche Website

This is the fourth post in a multi-post series on
how to dominate an affiliate marketing niche.
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Previous Installments: 
Select Affiliate Marketing Offers that Will Make You Money
Research Your Affiliate Marketing Competition Before You Enter a Niche
Design Affiliate Marketing Website Content That Dominates Search Results

IF you are going to play the organic traffic game, you can not ignore the SEO impact of your domain selection.  One of the most basic SEO techniques is to pick a domain that contains the primary keywords you are going to gun for.

Just because affiliate marketing competition was low in the niche I selected doesn’t mean that all of the good keyword domains were available.  In fact, there were no domains available that didn’t LOOK like keyword spam domains unless I wanted to spend $1200.

Normally when I buy domains I avoid hyphenated domains like the plague because people simply don’t remember them.  You might get an SEO bump at acquiring new visitors, but your odds of monetizing a visitor increase if you can keep them coming back.  If a person can’t remember your URL, they probably won’t come back.  Worse yet they may just forget the hyphens and end up on your competitor’s website.

Maybe I’m silly, but I couldn’t justify spending $1200 on a domain for a speculative website.  I would rather spend the $1200 on content because it’s a much better investment IMO.  Because of that I broke down and bought a keyword rich hyphenated domain that would AT LEAST look good to the human eye in the search engine results.

Because I know that more than 92% of visitors to my number one competitor’s website come directly from search engine traffic, placing the hyphens carefully was important.  I want my URL to look legitimate and worthy of a visitor’s click.

For example, rather than grabbing a domain like online-pharmacy-cialis.com I reserved a domain like onlinepharmacy-cialis.com.  The first keyword almost looks like a category or a top level domain and the keyword after the hyphen is more specific.  My HOPE is that this translates into a legitimate looking URL for a potential visitor who sees it on the search engine results page.

Where Should I buy My Domain?

I would recommend using GoDaddy.com.  They are pretty inexpensive, they offer just about anything any new affiliate marketer could need (statistics packages, hosting, SSL certificates, etc…

A new domain there costs less than $10 and if you use the coupon codes at dealtaker.com (highly recommended) you can get a .com domain for as little as $6.95.

Some people reported problems with GoDaddy when the .Me domain land rush started, but I got the domains I was after just fine.

So Why Cheap Out Now Thor?

In my post about buying content I mentioned that spending $1500 was nothing if you are building a $360,000 a year machine.  I still believe this is true.

However, I also know that this is a speculative business venture.  For example, the $1200 I could have spent on a domain like onlinecialisphamacy.com is better spent hiring a hot acting student and a professional camera to cut 10 tutorial-style videos to ad another dimension to my content.

Keywording your domain is important, but nowhere near as important as the content the search engines (and your human visitors) find there.  Always error on the side of content.

What is Coming Tomorrow:

Tomorrow I will post about how get your website built and your newly-created content posted inside it.  I am not a coding guy, so I am in the same boat as most people.  I will discuss what kind of website you want to launch, where you can go to get it designed, and the different options that are available at different price points.

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