As newbies in blogging we are constantly taught that its a good practice to match the domain name of our blog to the market that we are into. So for instance if I’m blogging about tulips flowers, my domain name should be something like ‘pinktulipflowers.com’ or ‘tulipsflowersguide.com’. I can’t choose a domain name like ‘girlsoverflowers.com’ or ilovenmsname.com’. Yeah, I know the sample url’s are kinda creepy. =p
But does it really mean we need a uniform domain name or something that’s related to our niche? I myself is not a pretty good example as far as this is concern. This blog for instance is an internet marketing/blogging blog. But the domain name is too personal as it has my name on the domain name. Lots of my friends even think that melvinblog.com is nothing but a personal blog and people don’t initially realize that this blog is not really a personal blog.
Another concern is the branding. A blog like ‘internetmarketingsecrets.com’ can more likely be recognized as a marketing blog rather than a blog like [myfullname.com]. Of course this could also play a psychological role to your potential visitors. Imagine, a first time visitor comes in to your site because he was directed their by Google. And then he saw that the domain name is somehow very far from the topic he’s looking into. What do you think would be his reaction/response?
The last factor is the search engine rankings. This isn’t so much of an issue when you’re blogging in a general niche like ‘making money online’ or ‘buying cars’ or ‘insurance’. However it could play a crucial factor when you’re into microniches. Example is when you’re targeting your audience locally. A site like seomalaysia.com has a better chance of ranking better than a site called raneshabdulrahman.com when it comes to providing search optimization services to Malaysia. Or maybe a very small yet targeted niche like ‘beta fish’ in which most audience if not all come from search engines. That would then become a much bigger factor.
Defying the Odds
What I mentioned above are mostly the general rules that most people will really give you especially when you’re just starting out. And to be honest that should really be it. It doesn’t seem to make that much sense to have an unrelated domain name to the niche that you’re blogging to right?
But still we have lots of sites to reference to as far as not following that rule when it comes to naming domain names. Good examples in this niches are johnchow.com, shoemoney.com, entrepreneurs-journey.com, davidrisley.com. All of which have horrible (unrelated) domain names to begin with but they’re definitely the top guns when it comes to making money internet marketing kind of niche.And then we have crazier domains like icanhazcheezburger and a whole lot more raking in tremendous amount of search traffic without following the so called ‘standards’ with on-page optimization.
So I’ll leave it up to you. Honestly, I know people are obsessed with blogging and naming their blogs after them (or their nickname) so that might be the reason why. But considering a uniform domain name is still should be an option and besides, there’s really no harm in trying to be ‘uniformed’. What say you?