Before we design our affiliate t-shirt site we need to get a domain name.  there re two thoughts about this.

If you are building a site that will be a sand alone store, that you are looking for search engine rankings and have no other way to direct traffic, then you need to find the best .com name you can with the fewest words, preferably with no dashes.

If you plan to drive traffic to the store using your existing sites or though some other marketing campaign, the tld is not as important and you can get away with buying a .info domain.

The goal of this series of articles is to better monetize your current sites so we are going to go with the cheapest route possible.  This is a short term solution but if you don’t have that much money, you gotta do what you gotta do.  Since nobody is ever going to type in the name of the site, we are branding for customer confidence first, search engine juice second, brandability last.

I use namecheap for all my domains.   I do this for a couple reasons (you may find a few stupid).

1. Price is almost the same for the domain
2. Free first year of privacy protection at Namecheap
3. Godaddy makes you just through 13 hoops just to checkout (no, I really don’t want your hosting or website building software)
4. I heard several stories of people that were accused of spamming and godaddy said they would not seize their domain is they paid Godaddy $400 even when they did not spam.
5. Did you read #4?  Do you really need any other reasons?
6. Bob Parsons kind of creeps me out and I find his advertising offensive.
7. I am a Christian and I don’t see the connection between domain registration and women in bikinis unless you are pushing porn.

I found a domain that I had registered sitting in my account so I am going to use it.

http://www.christiantshirtstore.info/

Here is why I picked it.  I wanted christian and tshirts in the name.  Since christiantshirts was gone, I used the s as the start of a new word.  The search engines don’t know it is not shirts.  I have used this a bunch in the past with good results.

I did a quick search and found the following domains available.  You might want to pick one up.

• christian-tshirts.info
• christian-t-shirts.info
• coolchristiantshirts.net, org, info
• cheapchristiantshirts.net, org, info
• discountchristiantshirts.com, org, net, info

So go get a domain, point its name server to your server and let it propogate for the next day or two while I write the next tutorial.

If you score a decent domain, let us know in the comments.