The Basic Stuff
Every website needs a domain name. Example WebBootCamp.com is a domain name. Your domain is your website address, a.k.a. URL (universal resource locator). Should you use your company name for your domain Maybe, maybe not. Is it memorable Easy to spell Does it contain keywords that relate to your business For more considerations on choosing a domain, Ive put together the following checklist.
Pick a memorable name. How catchy is it Would the average person be able to remember just your website name, without looking through their bookmarks (if they have even bothered to bookmark it, that is)
Make it easy to spell! Face it, most people cant spell. Try to target for the masses when you pick your name. Think of everyone having a 7th grade education.
Make it short, try for a two or three word domain. When possible, name your company the same as your domain name. Whether you actually add .com to your companys name makes little difference.
Use keywords in your domain. Try services like , , and to see what people are searching for, in BIG NUMBERS, related to your subject.
Dont use numbers or hyphens. These are easily overlooked or forgotten when people type in your domain. Unless youre using a stand out combination like 911alert or 123homerepair, dont go numeric. If you use hyphens, then every time you tell someone your domain, you have to say its blah-blah-blah.com - with the hyphens. This is not impressive, and you risk losing traffic to blahblahblah.com. Youre asking your potential customers to work harder, to remember tedious details about your name. Simplicity is important, because you want them to find you. Youre building a brand here.
Dont buy any other extension except a .com This is the best branded domain extension, highly known and trusted. Any other extension is practically worthless, in my book. In addition to being first in the minds of the public, remember also that most people trying to find a company will put a com after that companys name in their browser. Its second nature to most of us. A .org can bring attention for non profits, but even most of those companies will try to purchase a .com as well.
Avoid running names together that end in a vowel and begin in a vowel. EXAMPLE: freeebook.com Also try to avoid having the second word start with the same letter as the last letter of the last word. These combinations can look weird, and are often likely to be misread or simply forgotten. By avoiding these two combinations, along with numbers and hyphens, we make sure our words (and our brand) will stand out.
EXAMPLE: WebmasterNow.com
Good For Starting Sentences, Not Domains
Avoid starting your name with THE, or A, if being used as the word A. EXAMPLE asimplehome.com - a is likely to be forgotten. While it is true that directory listings usually list alphabetically, search engines do not.
If you can come up with a catchy name starting with a, by all means, do so. You may find yourself first in the yellow page listings. Have a look there first, and see what the competition looks like. What are their names, how do they rank
Now, heres where it gets interesting. Youll see that names starting with numbers get displayed first (for non paid listings). So the big question becomes, is yours the type of product or service that will do well from yellow page traffic You must carefully weigh this against overall branding of your company.
You could of course, have more than one domain, and more than one brand for your company, but be careful about promoting the same sites with different names to the same search engines. You could find yourself banned from those search engines altogether.
Brand New
Dont pick your name as your domain name, unless youre famous. Names arent keywords (wont help your search engine rankings), and usually easily forgotten. Unless youve built a big brand around your name already, stick to a good key phrase! It is much easier to brand.
Whos who, and is my name taken
To search available domains, and to find out who owns registered ones, use the whois function at If you come across a registered domain, it will show you where it was registered. The next step to detecting the identity of the actual owner, is to visit the registrar (this is where the domain was registered) site listed, and use their whois search. This should provide you with name, address, phone number and email of the rightful owner. Unfortunately, this information is not always available, but it is most of the time.
A Common Myth Equals Missed Opportunities
All the great domains are taken. Hogwash! The dirty little secret is, thousands of great domains expire every day! Heres a handy resource for finding great expired and expiring domains - - Ive found some real gems here, like webbootcamp.com, webmastertoolset.com, customoilpainting.com and customoilpaintings.com - all formerly owned and let go, just to name a few.
When applicable, do try to get the singular and plural versions of your domain like we just saw with customoilpainting(s). When one could be easily be mistaken for the other, it helps to be covered this way. Youre also protecting your brand.
Another expiring domain service to check out is . They have some interesting statistics for expiring domains, such as google page rank and yahoo and dmoz listed domains. Bear in mind that any perceived value on a domain put there by a search engine listing or page rank is inherently fleeting. Thats because the content that was responsible for that listing is now gone, and it is simply a matter of time before the search engines spiders crawl the site again, and re-evaluate its content. In other words, the search engine ranking is very likely going to disappear soon, unless you quickly repopulate the site with compelling content, worthy of the rank the original site had.
Roads To Nowhere, No Stops Ahead
One tasty bonus that accompanies a popular site is link popularity. This is how many other websites link to the domain in question. Think of a link as a road into your website. Quite often, webmasters do not update their links when the site theyre linking to changes or disappears altogether. So if you find an expired (or soon to be expired) domain with high link popularity (many links to the domain), it may well stay that way for some time to come.
Case in point: special-report-network.net was once a very successful ad network run by online marketing guru Allen Says. For reasons unknown, he shut down the site and let the domain expire. The domain had over 14,000 links pointing to it! The weird part is, it still does! Want proof Go to and search for link:http://www.special-report-network.net, without the quotation marks. This will show all the sites linking to it. The domain got snatched up by Ultimate Search, a hong kong company that registers thousands of domains, and makes money from paid search results. The site has nothing to do with the original ad network site that Allen built and made successful, yet the links remain, and links equal traffic.
Bear in mind not all links are created equal. Link farms (A.K.A. FFA or free for all links pages), and seldom visited by real people. Instead, automated programs add peoples URLs when they submit to a mass submission service, hoping to generate big traffic. Instead, all they get is a bunch of spam, which theyve agreed to receive, in order for using the service.
How can I snag that expiring hottie
When you find a name that is pending deletion (the owner hasnt renewed it), the next step is to try to secure it, the moment it becomes available. Strangely, domains do not fall back into the pool of availability the day they expire. It can take up to 60 days or more in some cases for them to drop, and the times are not announced. Thankfully, there are automated services to perform this task for us, such as , , , and . Prices vary, and none can guarantee success.
Namewinner lets users bid against each other for expiring domains and only the winner pays, while Snapnames and Expirefish are first come, first served, meaning only one user has a shot at grabbing a particular domain. Snapnames also has the most registrar partners, (including Network Solutions), which may give them an edge for securing expiring domains that are currently registered with their partners. They also have the highest price tag, and you pay whether or not they secure your name. is a newcomer that seems to rival the services of Snapnames, with better prices.
One more method you might try, is going directly to the current owner. Lets say your desired dropping domain is already back ordered on , and . Now you can still bid for it at , and , but you feel the odds are against you. If youre really hot on the name, and willing to pay a premium, you may be able to bypass the solutions above, simply by cutting a deal with the current owner.
This can be a bit risky however, because once the owner realizes your interest, they may decide to ask for a unreasonable sum of money, or simply see value in the domain again (generated from your interest), and renew it as an investment. Assuming you can make a deal, you may want to suggest using , which eliminates the possibility of fraud for both of you. The owner will need to renew the domain before they can transfer it to you.
The Website Graveyard - Visit Those Spooky Remains!
Once youve found a deleted or soon to be deleted domain you fancy, you might want to take a trip into the past, to see what that site used to be! Now bear in mind most domains that are registered are never developed, so there may be nothing at all to see. But for those domains with a tangible history, we can often peek at their ghost, courtesy of the wayback machine at
One Owner, Driven Only On Sundays
Another way to check the history of a domain, is simply to search for it. Try searching google, and , to see what people may have said about the site. You may think twice about purchasing a domain with a sketchy history.
Speculators Beware!
Dont go overboard and buy every known extension for your brand - (.net, .org, .biz, .info, etc.). Big corporations like google can afford to buy all the country domains. When youre starting out, remember, domain fees are yearly, and you need to consider the lifelong cost of each domain. For most people, one domain is just fine.
You may think snatching up good domains and reselling them would be a lucrative business. The problem is, finding a buyer is not easy. In fact, thats an understatement.
Dont register domains containing trademarks. You will likely here from that companys legal department if you do, and will be forced to relinquish the name by The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), or a lawsuit, or both.
Whos in charge
Icann (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) oversees the domain registration business. Their URL is If you ever have trouble with your registrar, it may be worth reporting to Icann.
Case in point: A client of mine tried to switch his domain to another registrar (at my suggestion), to get added free features (free URL forwarding), and save money. His current registrar denied the transfer, and tried to charge him a fee for leaving! Once we threatened to take up the matter with Icann, and publicly expose them at Icanns forum (http://forum.icann.org/regxfer), they immediately backed down, and released the domain.
If you believe someone has registered a domain that infringes on your trademark (or has infringed on your intellectual property), the authority to see is The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), at
Brand Awareness
Capitalize each word of your domain in your sig files and letterhead, and anywhere else you advertise your domain. It helps your brand stand out.
EXAMPLE: looks better than
Also, only add in when youre creating links back to your site (i.e., email, websites, and online forms). In all your offline advertising, such as signs, business cards and letterhead, you should definitely skip http://www. and just use YourDomain.com. You only have a second or two of peoples attention when they see your URL, so make it count. Brand that name! Just make sure your web host has your site set up to show without WWW. Most sites are correctly set up to display when a person types in YourDomain.com, or www.YourDomain.com but a handful, maybe 10% or so will show page not found, if you skip www. That could be devastating, so check with your host, and demand that your site come up either way!
Ready To Buy Your .com
Dont overpay! Im still surprised that many people dont know they can buy domains for under $10 these days. Shop around. Currently I recommend They offer a lot of extras like URL and email forwarding, free.
Keep Your Registration Current!
Dont let your domain expire! You cannot afford to be even a day late in payment. If it falls into the redemption period, you may find yourself high jacked by your registrar for an outrageous renewal fee. See this illuminating article for more about the redemption period - Domain Redemption Period Farce Exposed! here: . If your expired domain falls back into the available pool, it may be registered by anyone, and you may have little recourse trying to recover it.
The easiest way to ensure you are sent renewal notices for your domain is to keep your email contact current for your domain. Perhaps the most common reason for people losing their domains, is simply that they switch ISPs, and subsequently, their email address changes, and they forget to update that information with their domain registrar.
If you own a lot of domains, keeping up with administration can be tedious. One trick I rely on, is to use one domain for my primary business email address, and on that registration admin contact, I use my ISP email. For all my other domain registrations, I use my primary business email address (based on my primary domain, which I will never let go). Now, if I should switch ISPs, all I need to concern myself with is changing that one domain record, to reflect my new ISP email. All my other domain records have that primary domain email as the admin contact, so as long as I keep the one record current (and keep the email account active), all will be current, and all domain renewal notices will be sent to me.
In the end, its not so much about the name, as it is what you make of it. Just look at all the big successful internet companies out there with strange names! Yahoo!
To learn how to set up your domain to point to your hosting account, I recommend the reading materials in Web Boot Camp, an all inclusive how to guide for web business. Get web savvy today!
Copyright 2004 Jim Symonds
About The Author
Jim Symonds publishes Web Secrets Exposed! Eye popping, and jaw dropping, sneaky little web design tricks & web marketing secrets revealed. How did they do that We show you! Subscribe Now FR*E! Just Go To:
There are hundreds and thousands of websites on the internet today being bought and sold and there are many places you can sell your website such as ebay and website brokers. Though this article we will explore each of these possibilities in greater details.
Ebay - Selling a website on ebay can perfect for some and completely useless for others. As most people know ebay, it gets millions of hits every minute from people looking for everything from hair nets to race cars. For starters this is a great way to get word out that your website is for sale. It has lots of people viewing your ads but keep in mind your competition is feirce as so many people post sites for sale on ebay. To sell your website on ebay it has to stand out from the rest.
Forums - Forums tend to be a great place to sell websites. They tend to ask alot more questions about statistics and revenue than most other places but if you have a quality site you can sometimes get alot more for it buy selling your website in forums. Good forums for this include , and .
Website Brokers - Website brokers normally go out and try to get you the best possible price for your website. They tend to have contacts in the industry and will get into contact with people you cant or dont even know exist. They generally charge a fee of around 10%-15%. There are a few websites around where you can post your website up to brokers - kind of like a cross between ebay and a brokers firm.
Sell to your visitors - A commonly used technique to get a good profit from the sale of your website is to post a site for sale link or image on the frontpage of the site for sale. This targets the audience to people interested in the topic of the site. But be warned not all of these people are or want to be webmasters.
Personal Contact - If you have a low budget, selling your website though your personal contact can be very rewarding. This takes everyone else out of the equation and you pay no broker fees or ad fees. If you plan on selling your website this way make sure you know enough people who would be intrested in the site.
Website Checklist
Before you get to putting up website for sale ads and hiring a site broker, there are a few things you will need. Firstly, find out in detail your statistics. This including unique visitors per day or month, bandwidth used per month and current and past revenue for the website. Most people who are in the industry will ask for the pagerank of the website too. You can find out your page rank by downloading the google toolbar and re-visiting your website. A pagerank is considered by most webmasters as being a large factor.
About The Author
Matt Dobinson is the owner of - A website dedicated to buying and selling websites online for the best possible price.. He also runs - an online community for webmasters.