If you are looking to start an online business, you are probably in a hunt for the right domain name for your new venture.A good “domain name” is just like how a good “brand name” is crucial for the success of any conventional business out there. Think of some of the famous brand names in the conventional businesses.
KFC – the brand stands for its unique,delicious chicken dishes.
NIKE – branded themselves as a synonym for sports wears and accessories.
LEGO – we all know they make games & toys for kids. The name is so popular among kids.
You are already familiar with a lot of brand names and most probably you love many of them. To add a few more, we have Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Apple, Samsung,Windows, Linux etc. All these brand names connect themselves with a particular line of products. Windows easily connects to operating system irrespective of Windows Vista or 7 or 8. Apple connects you to a set of digital gadgets and it can be a phone, tablet or a PC. Pepsi connects you to aerated drinks. So what is the takeaway?
Lesson – 1
Ultimately a brand name should be able to connect people with its line of products or services.
Let’s come to domain names now. The basic purpose of ‘naming‘ is same in the case of a domain name and a brand name. Ideally, they both should be able to connect their products/services with its customers. A “domain name” is the brand name of a website or a web based business.
There are several examples that you can easily come up with.
- Google & Bing are branded domain names in search engines.
- Yahoo is a collection of web based services which offers content, e-mail, chat, search engine & a range of other services.
- Facebook stands for being a social network.
- Elance projects themselves as a freelancers marketplace.I can develop thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of examples of good, branded domain names.
Lesson – 2
Your ultimate goal should be to create a unique, brandable domain name for your new venture!
Let’s analyse some of the best domain names and see how they might have originated.
Note:- I have taken an analytic approach which logically analyses different domain names. I have taken this route because it simplifies the process of explaining good domain names & its origin. The analysis is based on many assumptions. The original creators of these domain names might have used a different approach or a different route (Intuition plays a major role in creating new domain names).
If you are too lazy to find a domain name, there are some awesome tools which can suggest you good domain names
Read – 5 Best domain name suggestion tools
Seven methods to find a great domain name
Type #1: Creating a brand new word from an already popular word
Example:- Yoast.com – connects a user with WordPress SEO & related plugins
I will begin with one of my favourite domain names – Yoast.com. This domain is owned by Joost de Valk who runs a consultancy business around this website. He has successfully built a business around SEO consultation for WordPress powered websites and Magento platforms. To make his website popular he has written highly useful articles in his website like – the ultimate WordPress SEO Guide , the Magento SEO guide etc.
There are hundreds of highly useful articles in his website, tailor-made for anyone who runs a website on WordPress. He helps people with their SEO efforts by releasing an awesome SEO plugin for WordPress. These initiatives have helped him earn a great reputation and this way he has built Yoast as a brand name which stands for WordPress SEO and related activities.
How Joost might have arrived at the domain name ?
You can see that “Yoast” sounds like a single word and it has only 5 letters in it. This is the ideal case of a domain name – a single word domain name in less than 6 letters. If you replace “Y” with “T”, you will get “Toast”. My assumption is that Joost jumbled many single words to create an interesting “improvised word”. Just take the case of Yoast. You are already familiar with the word “Toast”. Now start jumbling the word and you will get really interesting new words. Replacing “T” – POAST, LOAST, ROAST,BOAST,JOAST and finally YOAST. Another example to point out a similar style of naming is JANGO and it definitely comes from replacing “T” of TANGO or “M” from MANGO
Type #2: Creating a “one liner” for your business and arriving at a domain name from the one liner
In this method, a “one liner” is created initially that defines your website/business in a single line. Now based on this one liner, you can try different combinations of words that relates with your definition.
Example:– QuickSprout – The Neil Patels blog which helps people with great articles on business and online marketing.
I hope you are already familiar with Neil Patel and his incredible bog QuickSprout. If not, start reading his blog from today. He writes great articles about his experience in business, detailed guides on SEO, guides and how to articles on social media marketing and related stuffs. He has written some great articles on how to run and grow a business. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, I highly recommend you to read his blog.
Now lets come to the domain name – QuickSprout. His blog basically aims on one objective – to help people grow quickly in business. Here the one liner might be – “grow quickly“. So how to come with a domain name that resonates the idea of “grow quickly” ? You can do this in a simple way. Go to a thesaurus and search with some combinations like grow quickly or grow rapidly. It will give you good ideas about synonyms. Make a list of these synonyms, combine them in interesting ways and you will get the final one. Here “sprout” means to grow and “quick sprout” means to grow quick.
Type #3: Combining 2 or 3 words with a meaning
In this method we combine 2 or 3 words together to create an easy to remember, easy to spell and easy to pronounce domain name. The domain name can be either related to the nature of business/website like CircuitsToday or can be a completely different one like PepperFry.
Here CircuitsToday is a popular website which publishes latest electronic circuits and tutorials for electronics engineers. Their work is highly related to electronic circuits and associated contents. So they took “Circuits” as the first word and combined it with many other words like “Lab” to form CircuitsLab, “Factory” to form CircuitsFactory etc. They finally decided on “CircuitsToday” as it can connect with readers very easily and can last longer in their mind. Another reason to choose “Today” as the second word is its familiarity with people as there are many popular print magazines like UsaToday , IndiaToday, FinancialToday etc.
PepperFry – is an Indian e-commerce company that sells consumer electronics goods in India. The domain name is an easy to remember one and is good for branding. You may see that the name has no relation with actual business – that is e-commerce or online shopping cart.
A major share of good domain names falls into this category. Let’s see some more examples of domain names that might have created using this strategy.
1. WooThemes.com – They create premium themes and plugins for WordPress. They have combined their nature of business “themes” with a simple word “Woo“.
2. Elance.com – is a freelancers marketplace. Any one who wants to setup a new website or a web application can hire professionals from Elance and get the job done. Here they combined a word related to their business (freelance) with a single letter E.
Some other interesting domain names that falls in this category are LetsBuy.com, FlipKart.com, OfficeYes.com, etc.
Type #4: Combining 2 words without any meaning
So here is another interesting method which is exactly opposite to the third method of combining words with a meaning. The strategy behind this naming style is to create a kind of question or curiosity in readers mind – like – this domain name – “DollarFry” – hey! Whats that ? How can you fry dollars ? Such questions leaves an impression or it leaves a mark in your readers mind. This will help you to grab attention and readers will start connecting with your domain name. Another example is PepperJam.com – which is an advertising & performance marketing company based in USA. A new visitor to this website or one who hears this domain name for first time will get curious on – hey, who can make jam with pepper?
ShoutMeLoud is another example – a blog by Harsh Agarwal, where he writes great articles about SEO, Online Money Making, Affiliate marketing using Hosting companies and related stuff.He combined 3 words that does not have any particular relation with what he writes in his blog. Those words “shout” , “me” & “loud” when read together as “ShoutMeLoud” doesn’t have a specific meaning either. But he chose it for branding purpose. He wanted to stand out, create a specific voice of his own and he has been pretty successful with his venture so far.
Type #5: Combining words with digits/numbers
This is another style of creating domain names. Here a single word is combined with 1 or 2 or 3 digits. Some examples of popular domain names that falls in this category are Mobile9.com, Spark59.com, 37Signals.com etc.
Mobile9 – is an online magazine which publishes contents & news about mobile phone industry. They cover all new gadgets, new processors, new technology developments, apps and related contents.
37Signals – is a web based software company which sells Project management tool as a web based service. They have some other web based applications like To Do list manager, CRM etc in their offerings.
Type #6: Domain name with keywords
This type is mainly meant for niche websites. Assume that you are going to start a review blog/website about juicers and you are expecting lots of traffic from google with keywords(like best juicers, top 10 juicers etc).
In this scenario you need to look for domain names with keyword combinations like,
- bestjuicers
- topjuicers
- juicerreviews
- juicerguide
As we all know, all the above mentioned word combinations are keywords which people search in Google and you may get traffic from Google .
Type #7: Creating a brand new word that doesn’t exist!
This is a naming strategy used by new generation e-commerce companies, social networks & new generation web application businesses. There are a lot of examples that you can find in this category. I won’t suggest this style of naming for people without advertising budgets. Some examples of this style of naming are Myntra.com (an online retailer in India), Jabong.com (an online retailer in India), Junglee.com (a price comparison website for Indian market owned by Amazon.com), Reddit.com (a popular social bookmarking website)
We have analysed 6 different naming strategies used by different online companies and individuals. I hope you have understood the logic behind a good domain name. I believe this article would help you to find a unique name for your online business.find good domain name for your website. Let me know your opinions in comments!
So those are the seven methods in finding a great domain name for your business.
Also read,
How to Register a domain name for your website – a detailed article that explains how to register a domain name yourself via domain registering websites like Godaddy.
Best 4 domain registrars in internet – compares the best domain name registering websites like Godaddy, Namecheap and 2 others.
How to add a domain name to your hosting account – explains how to host your registered domain name. You have to host the files of your domain name in web hosting account.
Conclusion
Don’t jump in quickly, the domain name is the first step of your business and it should land perfectly. You may need to wait to find a good domain name for website, but ultimately nothing beats a good domain name.
You need to ask these questions yourself before registering a domain name.
- How much length should my domain contain?
- Should I include any keywords in domain?
- Should it sound brandable? or memorable?
- What should be my domain extension(Which audience I am gonna focus on)?
Hope you guys enjoyed this article ! Good luck with finding an awesome domain name , ask me in comments if you need any help.
So what is your domain registration strategy?
Sir if you help plz suggest technology related branding name
Hi Aman,
Can you be a little more specific about your technology niche?