Friday 9 April 2010

How to set up domain name forwarding

Having recently started selling on Etsy and Dawanda, I made myself some business cards to send out with my orders. However, www.newworldmonkey.etsy.com is not exactly catchy, neither is www.dawanda.com/shop/newworldmonkey. What I really needed was a succinct domain name. It’s also very useful for advertising as it looks more professional to have a proper domain name. I’m not very experienced at these things and I assumed that if I bought a domain name, I’d have to buy hosting and build a website. Luckily, it turns out that you can create a domain name and then forward it to a url of your choice. Here’s how to do it:

1) Find out what domain names are available. I am from the UK so I opted to use www.daily.co.uk which has a special offer on at the moment where domains are half-price. A lot of Americans recommended www.godaddy.com
2) Most of the good domain names are gone. I’m no expert but, based on my research, it seems that the best thing is to get a .com or failing that a .co.uk. You should write down all the possibilities available to you and compare them. A brief, catchy domain name is best but catchy is more important than brief. You also want to include your keyword in your domain name to optimize it.
3) I managed to get www.bohemian-jewellery.com for 10 GBP for 2 years. It doesn’t include my brand name but it is easy to remember and includes my two main keywords.
4) Daily offered me quite a few things to pay extra for. I think it’s best to opt out of everything and buy it later if you find that you need it.
5) Make sure that your domain name is registered in your name.
6) Once my domain name was set up, I went into my control panel on daily and clicked on domain forwarding. I then entered my etsy site and filled in the meta tags and meta description. Daily has a very good guide on this which they provide a link to when you set up domain forwarding.

Now if you go on www.bohemian-jewellery.com it automatically will take you to www.newworldmonkey.etsy.com. I hope this helps, please comment if you have any questions.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for this. There is some really sound advice and presented in a professional manner.

    ReplyDelete