First Step

On the Namecheap website, select the "Beast Mode" search option. Select a maximum price, check "Hide Unavailable" and "Select All" Top Level Domain (TLD) Extensions.

Select a handful of words to make your first search. This is what will appear before the dot in the domain name. The shorter the word, the less likely it will be available, and generally the more expensive it will be.

Our goal is to find a SHORT domain with a catchy name that is easy to spell and is cheap. This will take some digging, but some of the best gems are under $5.00.

You can sort the results by price, but the search interface in Namecheap is pretty buggy, and I won't show you everything. The best way to see everything is to select the "Export" option, which will create a .csv file to download, that can be viewed in a spreadsheet app.

Don't reload the page while it is preparing the export. If you leave the screen, it will stop. If it stalls or crashes, try it again with fewer words.

Import Results to Spreadsheet

Use your favorite spreadsheet app, or use google sheets by typing sheets.new in your browser bar. Select File > Import > Upload, then browse for the .csv file that you just created.

Select "Replace spreadsheet" if you are starting with a blank spreadsheet. Select "Insert new sheet(s)" if you are adding to a spreadsheet that you already started.

We'll want to sort the results to make them easier to read. Select View > Freeze > 1 Column, to tell the spreadsheet app that the first column is a header row. Then select the context menu directly above the "Price" Column, and click "Sort Sheet A to Z." You migth notice that these are significanlty different than the results that first showed up in the results on Namecheap.

To make it easier to read, I also deleted the empty columns, changed to a more pleasant font, and added the alternating color effect by selecting the whole spreadsheet then, Format > Alternating colors.

Another way I made it easier for myself to sort the options is by adding checkboxes, by selecting an empty column and selecting Insert > Checkbox. Then after you have selected the ones that you like, you can sort by the checkboxes column to narrow your results.

When it comes to actually purchasing the domain, I like to follow the rule, "Why buy one, when you can buy two at twice the price?"

While Carl Sagan meant this ironically when he said it, I mean it literally. In some business cases, it's most efficient to purchase TWO of certain components. This only works though if you value your own time and effort put into this. For $5.00 for the first year and a whole bunch of work, you can have your own website. But for $10.00 for the first year and a tiny bit more work, you can have two websites, one spicy and one vanilla. (Note that when looking at pricing with Namecheap, that is for the first year. The "retail" price is listed below, which is the price that you'll get charged for the second year if you turn on "auto-renew." If you do NOT, and you pay manually next year, then you can use a digital coupon and get at least 20% of the full price. Coupons don't usually work on sale prices, which is what you are probably getting.)

Even if you do only purchase one domain, in this training, I will show you how to forward your main "naked" domain to a "virtual business card" page for your vanilla business. And hide your spicy content behind that.

Create a New Google Account

Now that you've decided on one or two domains to purchase, we are going to complete one more step before that:

Create a new gmail account that you will use just for website administration. You should select the "Personal Use" option and NOT the business option. Something like mynewsiteadmin@gmail.com. No one will see it, so the words do not matter. If you later add custom email to your domain (like Paul@Werk.Baby), you can have this website admin email forward there. But you should keep this separate vanilla email account that will never have any adult content sent through it or be used for anything other than signing up for website related services. This is part of that compartmentalization that we've been talking about. This will also come in handy on the rare occasion where you sign up for a web service, and they only accept registrations with generic address like @gmail.com.

Add your domains to your cart and check out. Make sure that the "Domain Privacy" option is selected. That will prevent any of your information from showing up in the internet public records database. You should also put a recurring reminder on your calendar to pay for it. After we finish the second step, we will not be doing anything in Namecheap again until next year, so WRITE DOWN your login information.

You are now the proud new owner of a whole web domain or two, as well as all the subdomains underneath.

Don't peek yet, though! You essentially now own a page in the phonebook of the internet. Right now though, that page is not set up and is mostly empty, and if you browse to it, you'll get all sorts of security errors. Your browser will remember those errors in its "cache," and even after we get you up and running, you might not be able to see your website. The solution is to clear the "cache" in your browser (there will even sometimes be instructions on how to do that in the error page you receive.) But it is better to not have that problem in the first place. If you really want to look, do it in a "Private Browsing Window" so that your cache will automatically clear afterwards.