Whichever hosting company and domain registrar you choose to go with, you will need to decide on a domain name for your web marketing blog or business. It's worth spending some time deciding what it should be, as it will be an important factor in how your site is indexed by the search engines. Also, it's important that your domain name is relevant to the theme of your business or blog. Before deciding on a name, pick a keyword that will be your main keyword (or keyword phrase) from now on. Rather that a single word (from which competition will be great), choose a “long tail” keyword which is simply a phrase containing 2 or more words. This will help to make your blog stand out.

You will find that many of the names you would like to use are unavailable, because they are already in use – I buy domain names through Namecheap because, as well as being reasonably priced ($9.69), they keep a history of the last 10 names you requested – this can be useful if you are trying a few different variations of possible domain names and you're not sure if you have checked a particular combination.

So the name should be relevant to the content of your blog - ideally it should contain your main keyword. And get a “.com” domain name rather than a “.net”, “.info” and so on. The “.com” domains are of much greater value from a web marketing point of view. So as an example, if your main keyword is “red shoes”, you domain name should be “redshoes.com”, or “red-shoes.com”.

So when you have decided what domain name to go for, and you have found out it's available, go ahead and purchase the domain. I would recommend that you get your hosting through Hostgator, and of course you can buy the domain here also. They are a bit more expensive ($15) but you don't have to worry about changing the name server configuration. The thing to remember is, if you buy the domain through any other provider than the hosting company, you will need to give them the details of the host name servers. For example, if I buy a domain from Namecheap, I need to click on “Domain name server setup” and enter the name of Hostgator's name servers, which happen to be ns1335.hostgator.com and ns1336.hostgator.com. After giving this information, it can take up to 24 hours for this information to be refreshed on the hoting company's servers.

For your first domain, I would heartily recommend that you get your domain through the hosting company – it makes everthing simpler! Later on, as you build your Internet empire, you can shop around for your domains and point them to your host. You may even prefer to host your own domains – not something I would recommend, but many webmasters do just that.

Finally, just a couple of tips on choosing a domain name – don't go for a long name. If you intend to be actively involved in web marketing, you will be entering your details on forms here and there, and you will be glad you kept it reasonably short, believe me!