Tips For Choosing Domains to Acquire and Develop

As people I meet offline start to understand that I am a domain investor and consultant, I frequently have people come to me with lists of domains they registered for their business or upcoming projects.  I won’t lie, many times I cringe at some of their choices but try to remain optimistic because they are the end user and usually they want to develop these domains.  Ok, before I get too off topic I want to provide a small batch of tips today to remember when registering or buying domains on the aftermarket that you intend to use for development or even just investing. 

>>  Extension selection is very important.  Most businesses (especially in the US) prefer to have a .com.  Whether you are able to secure the .com of your choice or not it is wise to try and register your country code TLD like .ca, .de, .fr, .us, .co.uk.  Personally, I don’t recommend establishing a business on a generic top level domain (gTLD) like .info, .biz or .pro.  Although I have invested in and made decent returns from some gTLDs, I feel they are harder to establish a business front on. 

>> ‘SESSR Rule’ – Short, Easy to Say, Spell and Remember.  It is tough getting that .com that you want these days.  It may even be beneficial to open negotiation with the owner of the .com phrase you really want just to see their price point.  If you are going to register try to keep it three words MAX and I never use words like ‘and’ or ‘in’ within domain names.  Always try to get a domain that can easily be remembered and spelled.. Will it pass the radio test?  If someone heard your domain on the radio, can they successfully find your site on their first try when typing the domain?

>> Register in advance! Company names, potential trademarks, your kids first + last name .com.  Ok,  maybe the last example is extreme but I would love to have registered mine.  When forming a company, absolutely register the .com before you do anything else!  If you find that there is another company in a different locale that already has the .com I think that adding the ‘inc’ or your state abbreviation to company name .com works well, I recommend pairing these with an exact name of your business in a gTLD that re-directs to your home site.  (ie. your business domain is AceMetalworksInc.com .. try to grab AceMetalworks .net, .org or .biz).

>> Auto-renew or register for several years.  Many business owners are too busy to remember that their .com has an annual fee that needs to be paid.  Entire online businesses have been devastated because the e-mail notification reminding the domain owner about the renewal went to spambox or was deleted by a secretary.  I recommend renewing your domain name for 5 years at a time for business owners.  This will be a $50 investment that you will never regret making when you hear of others who’s names have been caught or re-registered by domain investors that are happy to capitalize off the traffic your site used to receive. 

>> Research the history of any domain name you intend to launch a business on.  Some domains that you register or purchase may have been used with mal-intent in the past causing that domain to be blacklisted in search engines or directories.  Also, check http://archive.org to see what kind of content, if any was on a domain name in the last few years. 

>> Common sense!  Avoid trademarked words and phrases.  If you want to spend your time and money registering and developing trademark infringing domain names just keep in mind that you are a wide open target for lawsuit.  Your domains and sites will probably be confiscated… work and money down the drain. 

>> Keywords and household phrases are good domains to own.  More and more people have google, yahoo or bing as their homepage and instead of typing a url into the url bar users will type keywords of what they are looking for in search engines.  Try to compete with some of the top keywords in your niche by getting a one word keyword .net or .biz. 

>> Avoid hyphens and run together letters.  Hyphenated domains are not likely to have any traffic and will be tough to brand online since the un hyphenated version will capture alot of your traffic.  Run together letters in domains with more than one word bother me, but they seem to be a better option than the hyphen.  Here is one from my own portfolio pokerrentals.com .. the double ‘rr’ just doesn’t look appealing.  However, when you capitalize the words it’s not so bad, PokerRentals.com.  Anyway, I try to avoid them if possible.

>> Choosing a registrar is important.  Godaddy has come to the forefront of the industry by advertising to the masses via television marketing.  They are a reliable registrar and offer good 24/7 support with competetive pricing.  Other registrars I recommend are Dynadot.com, Name.com and Moniker.com.  I have been going with Moniker lately because I enjoy the fast DNS access on new registrations. 

-= Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed these tips and found them helpful!  Happy Holidays =-