Choosing a good domain name for your blog or website is vital. Why? Because the domain name is one of the factors that most influences your brand. Secondly, the domain also has some impact on your search engine optimization (i.e., if it contains your main keywords) and on your direct traffic (i.e., if your domain is hard to spell few people will remember it).
One common mistake people make when choosing a domain is to only consider the short term. That is, they figure what their website will look like for the next three or four months, and they buy a domain name around that idea.
Let's suppose that a guy loves the Corvette cars, and he decides to start a blog on that topic. After researching for a while he purchases the domain CorvetteCentral.com. It is a good domain, because it is short, descriptive, it has the main keywords in it and so on.
The blog grows healthily, but after one year it reaches a plateau. The guy realizes that in order to make the blog grow further he would need to start covering other sport cars, and not only the Corvette. Guess what... too late! He is already trapped with his domain. At this point his choices are either to keep writing about Corvettes and accept the fact that his audience will be limited to fans of that car, or buy a new domain and start from scratch. I have been in that position myself, and it is not cool.
If you don't want to get trapped by your domain, you must plan ahead. Ask yourself how far you can take a website with the domain you own or are planning to purchase. What limitations does it have?
Creating niche websites is not a bad idea per se, but you must be aware that they have limited potential. If you want to create a business out of your website or blog, then the domain name must not limit you to a small niche or market segment.
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