As your wordpress site gets more popular you may want to use your own domain on your site, so rather than going to yourdomain.wordpress.com you could have people going to yourdomain.com which would then show the your wordpress site.
There are a couple of options available to you when it comes to domains. You could map the domain to your WordPress blog or you could forward it.
Mapping
If you map your domain, through WordPress, you are paying wordpress to make changes to your domain so that visitors to the site will only see yourdomain.com in the address bar instead of yourdoamin.wordpress.com. The mapping is done by changing the name servers for your domain.
You can use a domain you already own and just make changes to the Name Servers to point them to WordPress
WordPress have very good instructions on how to do this here.
If you don’t yet own a domain you could either buy your own from anyone of a number of companies such as:
or buy it through WordPress by following these instructions.
Forwarding
The less high tec option is to just use domain forwarding, this will allow you to tell people to use yourdomain.com and they will be forwarded to yourdomain.wordpress.com. Domain forwarding is usually very low cost £2 -£3 per year or in some cases free.
Forwarding your domain is usually a very simple operation using a screen in the control panel from your hosting company like the one shown below.
If you forward your domain to yourdomain.wordpress.com what you are doing is giving people a short cut to get there by using your domain name, which will probably be easier to remember for most people instead of yourdomain.wordpress.com.
The difference between mapping & forwarding is that with forwarding when they get to your wordpress.com site they will see the yourdomain.wordpress.com URL instead of your domain.
Forwarding is likely to be a cheaper option and you don’t need to involve WordPress.
Mike you are amazing – as ever thanks for your sensible, clear and helpful advice
cheers
Ellie