Domain Name Buying 101.
by Anthony G Adams
Yesterday, while swimming with some old friends (I would say 'getting a tan' but 'turning brighter and brighter red' is more applicable) the subject of buying web domain names came up after I told them I currently own over fifty of them. The learning process that has been www.drinkthc.com has given me quite a bit of real world knowledge on the subject. I did not go to school for web design or SEO and that's probably a good thing. If you want theory, this is not what you want to read. These are just my personal beliefs on what works after a lot of trial and error.
www.drinkthc.com started out as www.the-hangover-cure.com (the original site is still up, if you want to get a look at our humble origins and original color scheme) for reasons I will get into in a future blog dealing with SEO and what I believe google page crawlers are actually looking for in your site. The original site name didn't exactly roll off the tongue, especially when pitching the product to drunks at bars:
"Hey there, dude/lady, check us out at double you double you double you dot the dash hangover dash cure dot com." Off to a bad start. We expected some guy with eight shots of Jack in his stomach to remember this the next day. This is where you do not want to be. Luckily, there is a better way:
Sound it out. After you have picked out a potential domain name (godaddy.com can walk you through the process) you want to buy, gather your family, friends, enemies, etc. infront of your computer one by one. Have them find your site by simply telling them the name. Do not write it down and hand it to them. Just talk it out and watch the results. I recommend using your parents or the less tech-savvy for this litmus test (they are usually one and the same. Love you mom.) to get an idea of what can go wrong when you have a bad domain name. Never assume that just because you can find your own site that anyone else can.
If I told twenty people to go to my cool new site, www.bkoolwidgets.com, the results would be disasterous. www.becoolwidgets.com, www.bcoolwidgets.com, the potential for human error is enormous. This usually leads your potential customers to your competitor's site or dead ends. This is bad and exactly what happened with www.the-hangover-cure.com as people would forget the dashes, or the word "the" and so on. We now own several variations of www.the-hangover-cure.com as a way to safeguard against this in the future.
Compare www.the-hangover-cure.com to drinkTHC.com. It is easy to remember and cannot be confused with anything else. The success rate of telling someone "We sell The Hangover Cure, like THC? You just drink it before bed. Just go to drink THC dot com." and having them find us is obviously much greater than using our old approach I mentioned above. The Kodak posting below from Paul Arden can give you added insight into this theory.
Keep It Short If Possible. Wanna go buy a four letter domain name, like digg.com? You can't. Unless you are prepared to spend upwards of six figures to secure it. The story of Digg and how it was founded is a perfect example of this. These domain names simply don't exist any more. Literally, none of them. See also: two and three letter domains. I was in talks to buy binge.com (original name of The Hangover Cure at one point, don't ask) and was told I was getting a deal at $1,000 for the honor of getting a five letter, one word domain name that was easy to say. And that is on the low end of what you can pay for a five letter domain name. Thus, you have to be crafty and strike a nice balance between short and easy to remember or spend a lot of money on a domain name. I prefer the former.
Facebook started out as thefacebook dot com (they have enough incoming links as it is, not adding one more). I have no idea what they paid for their current domain name and the ability to drop "the" from their url but I am sure it was quite a bit. Every letter and/or word you can eliminate from your domain name helps. Keep your domain name short and easy to spell.
Dot com. Only buy a domain name ending in dot com. Strange new url endings like .us and .tv confuse people and are cheap for that very reason. Do not buy them. Legit sites end in dot com. Which site would you feel more comfortable spending money on, just looking at domain name alone:
www.microsoft.com or www.micro-soft.us
I have mixed feelings on .net web addresses. I am currently developing www.youdotcom.net simply because it sounds cool to me when spoken aloud and it was $8. This is a rare exception though, avoid buying any website that doesn't end in dot com.
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