Your website is one of the most important investments you can make in your business. A well-designed website that speaks to your target audience, contains rich and engaging content and incorporates SEO best practice provides a firm foundation for online success.

But, before you worry about number of website visits or think about coding, it makes sense to review your niche, angle, and target market. Your domain name is another critical part of building a successful website. Let’s take a closer look:

Finding a profitable internet niche

This is one of the fundamental starting points for a successful internet business. Think about your angle and your target market. Is your niche a profitable one, with high customer demand?

Spend some time thinking about what makes your company more attractive and compelling than the competition. Can you offer new services or think of different ways to market your product? Can you find innovative ways to speak directly to your audience and meet their needs?

Spend time on the idea-proving stage; it's harder to go back and change things later on

The following four points are key to achieving a profitable niche:

1.     Determine your traffic potential

·       Use a keyword tool to check monthly search volume

·       Search multiple niche keywords. Low search volume often indicates poor traffic potential.

2.     Think about profitability

·       Are people buying products and services?

·       Can your product or service fit in the demographic?

3.     Know your competition

·       Search keywords in your niche to see who and what is ranking

·       Pay attention to URL structure - short, descriptive URLs help users to visualise what to expect from the page and search engines to have a clearer understanding of what a page is about

·       Evaluate the competition. Use a backlink checking tool to take a closer look at the links to the competition. Reputable tools include: Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs and Majestic SEO.

4.     What’s your angle and does it have potential?

·       Creating a unique angle allows you to carve your place in the niche

·       Ask yourself how you can fill the competition’s void

·       Think about what your company is doing well and what you could be doing better

·       Find out if your competition is lacking features you can add

·       Don’t forget to use Google Trends to gauge the interest in a niche. If it’s going up steadily, there’s potential; if it’s going down, the window for potential is closing.

Choosing your domain name

Your domain name is another vital part of building a successful website and defining your business online. With nearly 113 million .com domains currently in use, choosing one that’s memorable and accurately reflects your brand has become more important than ever.

At its core, a successful domain name includes three essential factors:

1.     A clear mention of your brand

2.     Creative composition

3.     Compact construction.

Being easy to say and spell is also crucial in increasing pass-along rate. Anyone should be able to pronounce your domain; think about facebook.com and twitter.com.

Web domains are a crowded market, so it's important to cut through the noise

One quick and easy way to calculate your domain’s effectiveness is to try the “radio test”. If you heard your domain read aloud on the radio, could you and your potential visitors spell it correctly the first time? Is it virtually impossible to mistype it after hearing it?

Use your domain as a branding tool

Your domain name is the most important marketing tool to create buzz. Branded domains help enormously with word of mouth marketing. More than 200 million domain names are registered, but only an estimated 5-7% of these are premium enough to resonate with most people.

Branded domains also build integrity in earning links. Take a look at the following two domain names – which one is more credible?

infinityaerials.com vs. cheapdallastvaerialinstallers.com

You could also consider building a domain name around meaningful words with mass appeal, such as savings.com, fly.com or health.com.

A good example of a branded domain is dogwalker.com. Its founder, Eliot Silver, says that many domain investors weigh the value of potential for brand development higher than the value of current traffic or revenue. His website gets around 10,000 visits a month, with 20-25% of those from direct navigation.

Think creatively

Most single word domains are taken, but you can try a more creative approach to finding a domain name that fits your brand. Try these ideas:

·       Compound two whole words – e.g. FlightsCity

·       Blend parts of two words together – e.g. Microsoft

·       Affix a word with a suffix – e.g. Shopify

·       Make up a totally unique name – e.g. Etsy, Odeo

·       Tweak a word – e.g. Travelocity

·       Use a phrase – e.g. WhoIsHostingThis.

It’s worthwhile taking some time to brainstorm names, as having a clear and meaningful domain name can impact hugely on your success. Visit these websites for some helpful pointers: www.domainr.com, www.domaintyper.com and www.namestation.com.

Where possible, try to avoid hyphenated domain names as they have no branding and little SEO value. They detract from credibility and can act as a spam indicator, making it difficult to earn links. Hyphenated domain names also negatively impact word of mouth as they’re tricky to say without spelling it out.

They cause a loss in type-in traffic because people don’t recall hyphens or hyphen placement and, according to domainnamesales.com, type-in traffic accounts for 50% of all visitors.

Ultimately, you don’t need to be an Internet whizz kid to create a successful website, but putting in some extra effort at the beginning can really pay off. Invest your time and energy in building an online presence, content and reputation now and you’ll reap the rewards in the long term.