Choosing a Domain Name for your Vacation Rental Blog

I've finally got around to thinking about the domain name for my new cottage blog. Over the past couple of years I've come up with names for web sites and occasionally got around to registering them. From around $8 a year if you go for a 3-year registration, it's not a big amount to pay for that great name that may one day make a fortune. But, out of my little collection of names, there isn't one that is really appropriate to use for this purpose so it's time to find a new one.

How to Choose a Domain Name

There's a lot written about choosing the correct domain name for your web site. Everyone has different advice about whether you should select one that gives you a brand, or whether you have one that is ‘keyword rich', meaning that it will match the keywords that someone might type into a Google search.
As I am a relative beginner in the blogging world, rather than try and explain many of the aspects of setting up a new blog and take the risk of redirecting some of my own confusion, I'll be offering links to some of the best tutorial posts I've come across. These will be the ones that played an important role in my understanding, and come from the real experts. My expert of the day is Darren Rowse of Problogger. I've been reading his posts for many months and his straightforward and generally non-technical way of explaining a concept has helped me no end.

Darren's article on Choosing the Domain Name for your Blog is by far the best I've come across on this subject so take a look and see what you think. One of the interesting points he makes is about the TLD (Top Level Domain) – the bit that goes after the dot. Darren cites the case of one of his blogs that is focused on the Australian market and therefore has a .au ending. If you are in Canada and targeting the local market, then it would make sense to have .ca at the end of your web address. A word of caution here. Expect to pay around $18 for a .ca name and for it to take a couple of days to be recorded in the Canadian Domain Name Registry (CIRA).

Over the next few days, I'll be deciding on my blog domain name, registering it and setting up a hosting account with Bluehost, and will then document all that in a post at the weekend. In the meantime get creative and brainstorm some ideas.