6 Tips for Picking a Good Domain for Your Podcast or Website – TAP019

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Your domain is one of the most-important parts of your branding, and it’s how people will get to your website from anything other than a hyperlink. I share six tips for creating your domain.

1. Get your own domain, even if it just forwards

Many people will try to save money by using free services like WordPress.com or Blogspot to host their websites. This is fine, but it’s only $10–$12 a year to register your own domain. So even if it’s only forwarding to myawesomepodcast.wordpress.com, having your own myawesomepodcast.com will work so much better.

It’s also relatively easy to setup your WordPress.com or Blogspot site to look like it’s using your personal domain, but the process is more complicated than I will describe here.

2. KISS (Keep it short and simple)

Yes, “KISS” usually stands for “keep it simple, stupid,” but you’re smart people! Although it’s not crucial that your domain be just a few letters, the shorter and simpler it is, the easier to understand.

AndroidMobilePhonesCommunityPodcast (fake) is long and could easily be confused or forgotten. If that is truly the name of your podcast, you could shorten it to AMPCommunityPodcast (fake) or even drop “podcast” to get AMPCommunity.

3. Get the .com unless alternatives fit

Although it has no affect on your search-engine ranking, a .com top-level domain (TLD) is still the best choice. People seem to default to typing “.com” on a web address. There are certainly exceptions when the alternative TLD is part of your branding. GSPN.tv streams live video during recording sessions, and they have several TV-related podcasts. Other .tv websites often host video podcasts.

Then there are the “odd” TLDs such as .us, .info, or even our own .mx. Before Yahoo! bought Delicious, the web address was del.icio.us. Cute, but still a bit hard to type. Maybe you could use the .info for your podcast if it fits. My friend Michael Prince (and previous guest on the Ramen Noodle™ clean-comedy podcast) has the Too Much Information Podcast. Although his domain, tmipodcast.com, is already great, he could have possibly acquired toomuch.info (if it wasn’t already squatted).

And, of course, you know that I chose .mx for the Noodle.mx Network, because it easily looks and sounds like the word “mix,” so the domain has become part of my official name. Notice that I have never and will never write “NoodleMix,” but it is always “Noodle.mx” (although spoken “NoodleMix”).

If you want a domain with a creative TLD to fit into a word, then try Domai.nr.

4. Make it easy to spell and understand

It can be really cute to have the Gr8Andr0idP0dcast as a YouTube screen name, it’s not easy to tell people or even to retype since zeros can look like uppercase O’s and vice versa. Just imagine speaking your domain, “G R the number 8 android-with-a-zero-instead-of-an-o-because-I’m-cute … .”

If you have to explain the domain’s spelling, then pick something else.

For this same reason, avoid ambiguous or hard-to-spell words (especially international words). Someone looking for SpecialEffectsPodcast may type it SpecialAffectsPodcast (with an A) or SpecialFXPodcast. If you truly have to use that name, then spend the extra to register all common misspellings of your domain.