Beginners Guide to eCommerce - 'Get a Dot Com!'
by Palyn Peterson

Dig this -- you MUST get a domain name; not only is it professional, but it is key to your long term success.  There is no way around this one. 

The dot com is your business.  It is your place in the vast internet.  It is your address.  It is what people will remember. 

What store would you rather purchase from?  "MyStore.com", or "stores.internetmall.com/mystore"?  Which one would you remember?  And do try to get a ".com" before any other extension , it is familiar and comfortable.  Not that you won't succeed with a ".net" or a ".biz", in fact, there isn't any evidence that shows ".com" domains ranking better than ".biz" or ".web", it's only that people are generally more used to the ".com".

You can register domain names up to 64 characters.  With that amount of room, you should be able to register a good, catchy domain name. Do try to get your #1 keyword as a part of the domain name. There is evidence that keywords in a domain name affect ranking for the better. There's a debate going on about whether or not it is better to have hyphens in your domain name. Is Electric-Guitars-Wholesale.com better than ElectricGuitarsWholesale.com, or vice-versa? It is true that having hyphens seperating the words in your domain name will help the search engines find your domain for those keywords, but more and more, search engines are becoming sophisticated enough to pick out the keywords even if they run together.

So here's my take on it, don't use hyphens because they are ugly, harder to remember, and soon, totally unneccessary. If a search engine can't pick out the keywords in your domain name, then it isn't MSN, Yahoo! or Google, because they can. It also isn't the search engine optimization technique that will make or break your rankings.

Even if you aren't running a store online, and you are inerested in becoming an affiliate, get your own damn domain name! You'll need it for posting articles, refresh pages, name-sqeeze pages, reviews, and a host of other things you will eventually grow into.

It comes down to this: if you want a sucessful stake on the internet, you must have virtual real estate to use.

As far as registrars go, I personally like dealing with GoDaddy.com.  They have very good fees and offer a great array of features and support. 

Do NOT register the domain name through your web host if you are renting space.  Sometimes they register it in their own name, so they are the owners, not you.  And usually they charge more than is necessary. And it's a bigger pain in the ass if you ever change hosts.