A Good Domain Name Attracts Attention — and Makes Money

I’ve pre­vi­ously writ­ten about select­ing a good name for your site, and have recently found addi­tional infor­ma­tion about good domains that I wanted to share with you.  These ideas come from Mar­cia Yud­kin, an expert at com­ing up for good names for com­pa­nies, prod­ucts, and tag lines.  Marcia’s web site is located at: http://www.NamedatLast.com.

1. A good domain name is pro­nounce­able — Can you say it out loud with­out get­ting tongue-tied?  The name needs to work well with­out cap­i­tal let­ters or spe­cial char­ac­ters of any kind.   Think about how eas­ily you could give some­one the name over the phone.  If they can pick up on the name with­out hav­ing it repeated to them, you have a poten­tially good name.
   
2. A good domain name is spellable — Try to pick names that are eas­ily spelled.  Avoid com­bin­ing words in a way that let­ters are dou­bled and/or repeated.  For exam­ple, www.theelfshelf.com might be a prob­lem since the “ee” could also be mis­heard or mistyped with one “e” .
   
3. A good domain name is mem­o­rable — there are a lot of short domain names avail­able like yxxft.com, but you should not choose them because they are dif­fi­cult to remem­ber.   It is bet­ter to have a longer name like NamedatLast.com is more likely to be remem­bered by your per­spec­tive clients.
   

Here are some secrets for com­ing up with domain names that are not already taken:

1. What results can you focus on? Again, NamedatLast.com is a good exam­ple of this since it focuses on finally com­ing up with a good name after try­ing for a long time to come up with one.
2. Can you come up with a pun for the name? Mar­cia sites the exam­ple of Sitesfaction.com for a play on the word sat­is­fac­tion for a site design company.
3. How about slang? For exam­ple, Jingaring.com might be a good name for a web site that sells ring tones for cell phones.
4. Maybe some­thing sym­bolic? Maybe I should have cho­sen a name like DollarSymbols.com for this site’s name?  Any­way, you get the picture.
5. How about a vari­a­tion on a real word or phrase? Prob­a­bly every­one knows about Google’s name being a vari­a­tion of the word googol, an extremely large num­ber.  The namely really fits them, espe­cially now that they index almost count­less web sites at incred­i­bly fast speeds.

I wish you every suc­cess in your pur­suit of a good domain name for your site.

I found Marcia’s ideas in a book called Your Inter­net Cash Machine: The Insid­ers Guide to Mak­ing Big Money, Fast! by  Joe Vitale and Jil­lian Cole­man Wheeler.  I invite you to check out the book or other works by them at your next opportunity.

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