Tips on securing your ideal domain name
If you need to locate a good domain name to go with your current business, or because you are starting online, you may be puzzled about where to begin.
First, you will have to accept that the most obvious names the 'beachfront properties' of the internet are all already owned. Today, it may already be true that every word in the dictionary hasalready been taken. That is because more and more users of the web have become well-informed enough to simply type a likely-sounding name into the web address field of their browser. For example, a searcher looking for information about coffee, or wishing to buy coffee online would just type coffee.com into the web address field. This gives an acceptable result, and is quicker than using any search engine. The owners of the site, of course, get free and massive traffic to their web pages.
Generic names like business.com, piano.com, and so on may be open to offers by their owners, but be prepared to spend hundreds, or millions of dollars. I assume you are not in this marketplace, which is ridiculously over-inflated, but wish to buy a fresh, relevant name, which fits with your business or area for your new domain.
In this case, there are many clever options available. To explore them, I'll use an example. My theme for the new internet site I want to create is collectibles. I do a quick check, and discover that all the suffixes for the word collectibles itself are already gone - .com, .net, info and so on.
One option is to add a relevant adjective, and so create a two word name. Things like small-collectibles.com, discount-collectibles or golden-collectibles.com may be a good fit for your site, and still give potential visitors a good idea of what your site is about. Using free key word tools like keyworddiscovery you can type in your keyword and find what searches searchers are using when looking for the subject.
Performing a search, words like country, cat, firefighter and so on are common words available to combine with 'collectibles', obviously if they respect the purpose and focus of the projected site. You could also try thinks like mycollectibles.com (consider myspace.com).
Sometimes, this process of checking what searchers want will actually reveal a good idea for the subject of your new site.
On the other hand, if your business or idea has a geographical focus, you can combine that with the subject of your site mystate-collectibles, cheap-mytown-collectibles or similar.
Or, a useful option is adding a one letter prefix. For my subject, this would give me iCollectibles or eCollectibles, or the hyphenated forms, as a good set to look at. You could also use a given name in combination with the focusof your projected website, depending on how familiar you would allow your enterprise to be robs-collectibles.com.
You could follow successful companies - buy a domain name with no meaning, and spend some effort on its branding. Words like google, yahoo, kazaa, and skype are examples of this. It may be hard to credit, but these were formerly words missing from any dictionary. Who would not like to own those domains today?
About the Author: To read more about getting your domain, and how to make money from domains, read my page about buying and selling domains for a profit.
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