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TIPS ON HOW
TO CHOOSE A DOMAIN NAME
The domain name is
your online identity. You want to make sure that you pick the best
suitable domain for your web site.
Domains
Registered for Business.
With approximately 64,000 domain names registered every day, it is getting
more and more difficult to find a name that you would like to have for your
business or personal use. It is not as bad as it sounds. There
are still many dot com domains available if you have the patience and the
know-how to find them.
Sometimes searching for a domain name takes weeks or even months. For
our real estate company, we chose the domain name webstreetrealty.com.
It would have been great if we were able to register the domain name
realty.com, but we couldn't since the name was registered since
1995. So, we had to compromise. After many tries and many months
of searching, we have accepted the domain name out of a dozen domains names
we registered. It is a very difficult task, but as a rule of thumb, if
you are not willing to purchase a domain name that has been already
registered and you are not willing to pay big money to buy one from the
secondary market, put in mind the following when you are doing your search:
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The .com
.net extensions should be your first target. In our opinion, a
lousy .com or .net is better than the best of the rest. The only
time we recommend that you buy the other extensions is when you are
trying to protect a domain name you own from being used by a third party
who may be just trying to take advantage of your name brand which should
be protected through trademarks and alternative similarity of the name
you have. For example, it's a good idea if you own amazon.com to
also have iamazon, eamazon, i-amazon, e-amazon and any other similarity
that is available to protect your domain name.
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Find the
shortest domain name that describes the business you are about to
identify. More importantly, the domain name should mean something,
even if the name is longer than those which do not mean anything.
This rule does not apply to 2 and 3-letter domains. The domains
that will attract attention are those with the coolest sound and the
funkiest tone.
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Those which
begin with i, e, info, next, world, planet, universal, US, net, web,
metro, digital, digi, euro, are next. Names that represent well
known landmarks like the red sea or amazon are easy to brand and accept
by consumers.
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Unknown
abbreviations or trademark similarities are discouraged. Many
names we see available for sale have no meaning which makes them
difficult to use for business or resale.
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Our multiple
registration search engine has many uses. You can get text from
anywhere and copy and paste the text into the search box. Add .com
to the end of each word or word combination (leave no spaces). Use
the enter button to separate each .com word or phrase in the list.
You can process up to 30 entries this way.
Domains
Registered for Resale
1. After the prices of prime domain names hit an all time high -
achieving $7.5 million for business.com, $5 million for asseenonntv.com, and
$3 million for altavista.com, the prices have recently dropped. This
is what is referred to in real estate as a down cycle. This down cycle
was created primarily as a result of the market saturation with domain names
for resale. Many sellers have preferred to cash in and sell their
domain names at the best offered price regardless of the value of the
domains.
We have seen some very valuable domains go for very low prices on different
penny auction web sites. Adding to this, many new companies do
not mind any longer to have just a name for their business rather than
buying an expensive aftermarket domain name that can cost in the six figures
range (BIG MISTAKE). There are many startups with laughable
domain names and most likely they will realize this fact after it is too
late.
The future value for high quality domain names, .com .net .org, remains very
promising regardless of the number of name extensions which are being
aggressively create. The major buyers for those names are the dot com
companies who try to protect their trademarks by purchasing every relevant
domain extension. This is like going to the horse races and boxing out
the favorite in every possible combination, but does not reflect the
real reason for purchasing the new extensions for domain names. The
fact remains that the number of web sites that use those extensions is very
small and we do not expect this trend to change in the near
future. We continue to believe that there are many choices
available in those categories to last for many, many years to come without
the need of creating new extensions. However, we do believe that some
valuable domain names can lie within the local market categories for those
extensions. For example: .co.uk is a great name to have if your
business is in the UK or you believe that having a distinction as being in a
certain geographic area is a plus.
Domains Registered for Future Use
Until there is a new invention, the internet will continue to be an
important if not the most important part of e-commerce and beyond. The
price today is very very cheap. Buying a domain name to keep for
future use or resale could be similar to buying a beachfront property a
century ago and keeping it to sell it in today's market, however we do not
expect that you will have to wait that long. The number of registered
domain names is expected to reach threefold what it is today.
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