1. Niche -Decide on a niche to
concentrate on for the "session". Meaning for the time
you have set aside to look for domains focus on one subject
area. Hopefully an area you know a fair amount about.
For example I have some IT certifications so I focused on IT
certifications for my subject to look for type-in domains.
I would also recommend you concentrate on one area at a time,
since it will take awhile for you to get a feel for the type
sites that end users are using in this "niche".
a. Keep track of the
high traffic sites you find in the niche. You can either
take a guess by the amount of content, forums, and feel of the
site for traffic or use Alexa or other tools. This site
may end up being your customer for your site.
2. Research - To
research possible
keywords we try to find the main web sites for the subject for
example certmag.com
and see what type of words people tend to use. Also do
some searches on Google.
a. One easy thing to do is
go to a main web site of the industry and view the web page
by Source (IE go to View > Source) and look at the meta tags
(right after the title a meta tags) this gives you some
keywords to research.
b. Use other tools
like Acronym Finder,
for names try Names,
for the largest US cities try this
wikipedia list. Use your imagination and
experience. For more tools check out the
Resources.
c. Track the keywords
you look for and compare them to the site names you found in
step 1. This will make sure you stay with somewhat
similar names.
3. Stats - Check to see how
much people actually do search with these words using tools
like Overture,
Google by running a search your looking for over a 1,000,000,
but sometimes can take less.
4. Availability -
Open up a
registrar's page and try to find one with bulk registration
like GoDaddy.com which
allows you to search up to 500 names at once. Or if your
looking for country .TLD's or to see everything available with
the domain name I like
Network Solutions,
but it only allows 10 domains at a time. At this point
you just want to see if it's registered at all. We
recommend brainstorming your domains all at once even if you
come up with some wacky names as some of them might end up
being gems.
a. When checking for
availability of good domain names it's useful to utilize tools
that help you combine keywords into possible domain names.
These tools can be as simple as an excel spreadsheet using
concatenate command or programs like
NameBoy. For more
of these tools check out the
Resources section.
5. End User Sense -
Does your potential
domain make sense for an end user, does it sound good, is it short enough, but
still make sense. Remember your going to sell it to an
end-user they need to be able to understand it right away it
should be something you can say on the phone and people would
know exactly what your talking about, because that maybe what
you do. Here are some things to consider when
registering a name to sell to an end user:
a. Is it a geo name
(geographical name)? Is the area big enough to support
selling the domain? Okay you only need one person to
sell a domain, but be realistic how many people\companies do
you need to sell this domain to the people who don't have one
or would redirect from it.
b. Realistically how
much money would they spend on "branding" this domain to make
it recognizable? The more "branding" money the lower you
price and likelihood you'll sell the domain name.
c. Is it too generic?
For example the odds of Samsung wanting televisions.com is low
because they already spent billions establishing the "brand"
name Samsung. Of course for most small-medium business
your trying to sell to this may not come into play.
d. Does the name match a
product\service that a company is selling without of course
violating trademark issues. For instance
guttercleaning.com.
e. You can go with "brandable"
names just remember what you think is brandable and what an
end user does may be two different things.
6. Common Sense -
Okay your happy so
far now use your common sense. Just because Michigan DWI
Lawyer pays a lot and is searched a lot does not mean
LawyerMichigandwi.com is a good name. In fact I will
research names a session and then wait 3 days prior to
registering them to make sure I'm not out of my mind.
Yes you'll lose some but you make up for it in the money you
save. Take a look at some of the horrible domains I
registered before I knew better -
Bad Domains.
6. Register - Finally your ready
to register your domain name. Check out the
Domain Registration
section and then the Domain
Parking to learn more about how to park a domain.
