5 Easy Steps to Choosing the Perfect Domain Name

Choosing the perfect domain name for your online business can be challenging.

In my coaching practice, I find a lot of my students get stuck on this step.  Over the years I’ve registered over a hundred domains for various website projects I’ve worked on and over the years I’ve found a few simple tools that make the process easier, simpler and faster for me.

I’d like to share with you some of these tools to hopefully make your life easier.

You don’t have to use all of these tools, but just knowing what the different options are can save you a lot of time and frustration in trying to find the perfect domain name.

Step 1 -  Brainstorm Keywords and Do Research

A good place to start is to brainstorm base keywords related to the type of business or website type you are going to be creating.

For example, lets say that you are going to be creating a website to showcase your portfolio as a wedding photographer.  In this example, you could create a list of base keywords related to photography and wedding photography such as:

• photography
• photographer
• pictures
• wedding photography
• wedding photographer
• wedding pictures
• etc.

Next, to do some research we can hop over to Google AdWords Keyword Tool and type in our base keywords to see what kind of data we can pull from Google.

Now, we’re not looking at picking a domain name here just yet but rather just seeing what kind of searches people do around the different base words that we picked.  A quick glance shows that “photography” gets more searches than “photographer”, but we have to put our thinking caps on here and think about this a little bit.

What are people really searching for when they use the keyword “photography” in their searches?  Are they looking to hire a photographer or are they more likely looking for photography resources such as photography classes etc.?

Personally I think when people search online they use keywords that they use in normal conversation.  If someone I know was getting married and they were looking to get wedding photos done they are probably much more likely to say “I’m looking for a wedding photographer” than they are to say “I need wedding photography services”.  That’s why I would probably try to go with a base keyword like “photographer” or “wedding photographer” rather than “photography” or “wedding photography”.

By using tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool and trying different keywords and keyword combinations we can sometimes learn very interesting things.  For example when I was doing research on my name (InspiredMoneyMaker.com) I was researching the word “Income” as an alternative to “Money”.  However, my research showed me that most people who search for the word “Income” are generally searching for “Income Taxes” rather than “How do I make more income.”

In a natural conversation I think people are more likely to say “I want to make more money” than “I want to make more income”.  Figuring out this kind of thing is not easy as it takes a bit of an understanding of human psychology, but I think it’s well worth it to help you pick the perfect domain name for your online business.

Once you have a short list of some base keywords for your type of business, you can proceed to the next step.

Step 2 – Try Your Luck at Guessing a Good Domain Name

Sometimes you can fluke out and one of the first domain names that pops into your head is available.  If that happens, why waste your time going further?

I recommend using an Ajax enabled domain name availability search site such as AjaxWhois.com to speed up your process of randomly guessing / picking a good domain name.

Basically how a site like this works is that as you’re typing in the domain name in the search query it is instantly checking for domain availability.  This can greatly speed up the process of picking a domain name if you’re looking to just type in random names and want to see if they are available.

You can combine one of the base words you came up with in Step 1 to create a unique name that is hopefully available.

As you’re doing that, however, you will want to keep in mind some things to avoid when picking a domain name.

Step 3 – Know What to Avoid

Choosing the right domain name is just as much about knowing what to avoid as it is about finding a name that’s available.

Unless you are looking for a domain name for an educational, government or charitable organization I would recommend sticking to “.com” extensions only.  If the “.com” version of your domain name is already taken, and lets say you end up getting the “.net” version of it, chances are you’re going to lose a lot of your traffic to the “.com” domain.  People who are looking for you are just naturally going to type in “.com” and then you’ll be sending traffic to someone else (usually your competition).  Just stick with “.com”.

Also, unless you’re going to be taking the “build a big brand” path to your online business, you will want to avoid the following:

• Stay away from numbers – Registering a name like “Photographer247.com” may sound and look cool to you at first but people will inevitably end up trying to reach you at “PhotographerTwentyFourSeven.com” or “PhotographerTwentyFour7.com” or “PhotographerTwentyForSeven.com” etc.  Numbers just complicate things so try to stay away from them.
• Stay away from hyphens – This isn’t a total “no no”, but if you can try getting a domain name with no dashes or hyphens in it.  Dashes make things complicated.  Your domain could be “Wedding-Photographer-Steve.com” and someone will try typing “WeddingPhotgrapherSteve.com” or “WeddingDashPhotographerDashSteve.com” if for example you’re telling them the name over the telephone.  Some people don’t even know where the “dash” or “hyphen” is on the keyboard.  They may end up using underscore or something else.  Stick with no dashes if you can.
• Stay away from “cool misspellings” – Unless you’re going to be investing a lot of energy and money into branding your company, stay away from “cool misspelled” domains where you create variations of words because the actual words are no longer available.  For example “PhantasticWeddingFotographer.com” or “PhanWedFoto.com” or something like that.
• Stay away from Roman numerals – As with numbers, stay away from Roman numerals.  “PhotographerIIGo.com” may look cool to you, but not everyone will get it.
• Stay away from excessively long domains – At first glance it may seem like all the short domain names are taken.  Don’t be lazy and end up registering “VeryGoodWeddingPhotographerForYourPerfectDay.com” just because you’re too lazy to find something that’s simple, short and not taken.

If you’ve done your research, tried randomly picking some domain names, staying away from the things I mentioned above to avoid and can’t find something you like that’s still available, the next step will help you out.

Step 4 – Use a Keyword Combination Tool to Help You Find Hidden Treasures

A really cool way to find some pretty cool domain names is to use a keyword combination tool to help you.

A lot of these tools are actually used to generate keywords lists for Pay-Per-Click campaigns but I like using them to generate domain names as well.  The way these tools work is that you start with a list of your base keywords.  In our example, lets go with:

• photographer
• wedding photographer
• pictures
• wedding pictures
• etc.

Then, what you can do is you can create prefixes to try at the beginning of your base keyword.  For example:

• perfect day
• wedding day
• your day
• on time
• reliable
• last minute
• etc.

Then, you use the tool to combine the PREFIX + BASE WORD + .COM to form an actual domain name.  Here’s a screen shot from the AdWords Keyword Combiner by Ryan Olbe.

So what happens next is that the tool spits out all the different combinations of prefixes and base keywords followed by the .com suffix to generate a list of potential domain names.

If you come up with just ten base keywords and ten prefixes, that will generate one hundred different possible domain name combinations for you to try.

Now, you could copy and paste each one of these domain name combinations from the tool above into AjaxWhois.com to see which ones are available, but there is a better way to check availability on a large list like this.

Step 5 – Use GoDaddy’s Bulk Registration Tools

When you have a whole listing of potential domain names to check there is a much faster way to see what is available instead of typing them in one by one.  We can use GoDaddy’s Bulk Registration form to accomplish this.

Simply paste the domains you generated using the keyword combiner tool above into the bulk registration form like so:

Once you paste all the different combinations into the bulk register form, simply click the “Search” button and GoDaddy will come back showing you an error for all the domains that are already taken.  The cool thing is that all the domains that are left in the search box are available!  Here’s what I mean:

Final Words

Once you have your list of available domain names from the GoDaddy Bulk Registration Tool you can copy and paste them into a separate document and look at each domain name one-by-one to see if any of them resonate with you.

If not, you can always go back, do some more research and generate another list of available domains to choose from.

Sometimes it helps to separate this process into two sessions.  In the first session you take it to this point where you have a listing of available domain names and then you put it aside for a day or two.

After a day or two, if nothing popped into your mind in the interim you grab the listing of available domain names and see which one resonates best with you.

This process of picking a domain name may seem tedious but trust me when I tell you that picking a domain name is important.  You don’t want to rush through this step because you’re excited to get going only to find out later on that the domain you picked wasn’t the right one.

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