A domain name is also called a Universal Resources Locator (URL) and, like a street address, is used to find specific sites on the web. Having your own personalised URL is now a very popular fad. So-called celebrities like Tyra Banks and Justin Timberlake have them as have many others and they are using the DOT WS domain suffix which stands for website.

It's easy enough to get a domain name with your name, but once you get it, what can you do with it?

This article suggests 10 ways in which you can use your domain name for either personal or commercial use. Here they are:

1. Personal Portfolio

A portfolio is a collection of your career or creative achievements and is used generally to find employment. These are most popular with creative professionals like artists, architects, graphic designers etc because they can provide examples of their work for prospective employers.

Simply place your URL on your letters, business card, motor vehicle bumper and people can visit your site.

2. Personal Family Site

A personal family site, perhaps with your family name or something like "Smiths-of-Chicago" can be a cool way to store family photos and information for relatives and friends. When my grandson Tory was born I set up a personal site for him and added photos each month showing how he had changed. His other grandfather in South Africa, who had never met him, could look up the site and see how he was progressing.

3. Sell Your Products or Services

This is a common way to get your business or product noticed. Imagine your website with "Architects-in-Melbourne". One of the benefits of this type of site is that when someone wants an architect, they will usually enter their location in the search engine so they get locally available people. With a URL like this example, you'd have a good chance of being found.

If you have a bricks-and-mortar business a URL gives you an added dimension of advertising and visibility for very little annual cost. If people want to know about your company you can make the information available online without having to pay for brochures and booklets. Add a blog to your site and you can inform people about what you do, how you do it and encourage happy customers to join in with testimonials. This type of site is limited only by your imagination.

4. Sell Affiliate Products

When you sell someone else's product for a commission, it's called being an affiliate. You can set up an affiliate site in under half an hour if you are in a hurry. All you need do is get a domain name and somewhere to host your site, establish a merchant account and choose a product. Next you need to advertise to get a swarm of traffic to your site, preferably traffic interested in your product.

The current wisdom is that you get yourself a niche product ie, a single product that a discrete market needs eg, golf balls and then sell golf balls to the golfing fraternity. Among the many advantages of affiliate marketing is that you don't have to pack, post or download the products, you can drop-ship or only sell digital products that are all handled by someone else.

This has become a very popular way to make an additional income and many people make all their income from affiliate marketing. Your site could be called something like "initialled-golf-balls.ws".

This is the end of Part 1. Go to Part 2 to finish this article.

Copyright Robin Henry 2007