I bought a domain name, what do I do next?
By: Brendan Fitzpatrick
I just bought a domain name, what should I do with it next?
Excellent question! The answer really depends on what you want to do with your domain name. Do you want to develop it? Do you want to resell it? Do you want to see how much traffic it receives?
Regardless of what you want to do with it, you should immediately put up a splash page describing the uses for the site. It will usually take several weeks if not months to develop your site or even to find potential buyers. It cannot hurt to add basic text, a title and description to the html of your page. I won’t go into META TAGS but you should create them so the search engines crawl your site and index it so that people can find your site.
Once you put your splash page up you should join http://google.com/webmaster and verify your site and submit it to be crawled. For the purpose of this article I have purchased http://workanniversary.com to serve as an example. Although you won’t find this domain in your searches yet it will likely appear in the top 100 of google searches for ‘1st work anniversary‘, ‘5th anniversary’ and so on. With a little luck it will appear in the top 100 for ‘work anniversary’ and although not generating lot’s of traffic yet, it’s a good foundation to start vs. letting your domain sit idle.
You can host your domain for as little as $5/month and if you search hard enough you will find free hosting. Again, hosting is not the intent of this article but I will elaborate on options in my next blog.
The next best thing that you can do for your new domain is to blog about it, just as I’m doing with this article (don’t forget to link the content of the article back to your site). Creating links to your domain will build integrity with the domain and therefore increase your search rankings.
You can also hire someone from elance.com for $20 or less to create a 1 or 2 page article to host on your domain, another excellent way to build integrity for your domain. If you are hardcore you can also promote your site via social networks such as twitter, google+, instagram, facebook etc. If you have an impulse to buy a domain then following these simple steps may bring it to the next level.