If you’re new to Internet marketing then one of the most challenging skills to learn is how to buy the right domain names. Indeed, this is one of the most important skills you will learn. If you can get it right from the beginning of your online marketing career you’ll be headed towards success much earlier than your peers.

First of all  what does buying a domain name mean and why should you buy one?

Purchasing a domain name means buying the URL, or the name of a websites. You will own this web “property”. It’s like a small plot of land on the Internet. You can build a website on it. Or, you can just sit on the domain name with the hope of trying to sell it for a profit at a later date.

There are many reasons why you should buy and own your own domain names. If you’re an affiliate marketer you’ve surely noticed that many affiliate marketing programs such as eBay or Amazon ask you to submit a website when applying to the program. Currently, there’s a trend among affiliate marketing companies where they want their affiliates to own and run their own websites on their own domains.

This largely an effort to improve the quality of traffic. With the growth of web 2.0 over the past few years many affiliates have used article sites such as Hubpages.com and Squidoo to link to their vendors. Vendors have noticed lower conversions from visitors from these kinds of sites and have thus pushed affiliates to run their own websites.

As a beginner you’ll probably buy your first domain name at Godaddy.com, the largest registrar of domain names. Please keep this in mind: GoDaddy is where you buy your domain names but it isn’t necessarily your host. While they do offer hosting services most people chose to use a separate web hosting company such as Hostgator, Hostmoster or Bluehost.

Once you’ve picked the name of the domain you’d like to buy you’ll be faced with many choices or domain endings called extensions. The top three are: .Com, .Org and .Net. After that you’ll see other extensions such as .Info, .Biz, .Me, .CC, .Ca and .Mobi.

We’ll call these other domain extensions “second-tier” domains. While you may be tempted to buy one of these these because of a lower price (.Info domains go for a few bucks the first year then the price goes up) you’ll learn in Brain G. Johnson’s affiliate marketing courses that it’s much better to stick with the .Com, .Org or .Net domains.

Why? Because Google likes them. If you search any keyword you’ll find that almost all the results on the first few pages are build on these domain name extensions. You’ll rarely see a .Info domain come up in the search results. This is because it’s possible that Google knows that a lot of short-term affiliate marketers are building thinly contented sites on .Info domains.

Buying domain names really isn’t too complicated. If you learn a few basic concepts in the beginning including buying only .Com, .Org and .Net domains you’ll save yourself from lots of heart ache in the long run and come out a winner in your Internet marketing career.

Do you have a view on the right way to buy domain names? Share it with the world below in the comments section!