Ever wonder how to pick the perfect domain name for your business? In this video, I share with you my SECRET Domain Name Formula that I’ve refined and used for the past 20+ years to pick some of the best business domain names for my clients.https://youtu.be/kZrbzP2j7Gc
Transcript
Do you know what makes a great domain name and how to pick the best one for your business? Well, today we’re going to chat about that.
Hi, I’m Jonathan with Valorous Circle, and today I want to talk about one of the most common questions that comes up as we’re doing digital marketing or creating a website for a client, and that’s how do I pick a great domain name, and what are some of the things I should be looking for when I pick that domain name? Well, it’s a great question, and I’m going to give you some guidance today on my recommendations on how to do just that.
First, it’s important to understand that virtually every five and six-letter domain name that you may want to find online is probably already registered. That means that you either need to come up with some unique acronym for your business in most cases, or you need to find some sort of domain name that reflects what you do that’s easy to remember. Well, there’s a couple of do’s and don’ts related to this.
The first do is try to think of a domain name that’s easy to remember when you only get to see it for maybe half a second or so. Imagine, if you would, that you are driving down a highway and you’re seeing a billboard, and the only thing on that billboard is a domain name. Make that easy to remember. For example, if you’re in the trash hauling business, instead of coming up with a short, four-to-six letter domain name that reflects your initials or something like that, focus on something like VIP Trash Service.com. Why? VIP Trash Service is a lot easier to remember than VIPTRSH, which could be six letters. But, hard to remember. So, pick something that’s memorable.
The second tip I want to give you is pick a domain name where you can get the dot com extension. As you know, there’s a lot of different endings that we can get for our domains, like dot com and dot net and dot org, and hosts of others, including things like .expert. But I’m going to recommend that you find a domain name that ends in .com. I know they’re harder to find and there’s fewer out there, but by default, when people hear a domain name, in this cash, VIP Trash Service, they’re not going to think to put VIPTrashService.net, they’re going to put in VIPTrashService.com; that’s the default that everybody goes to. And the last thing that you want to do is pick a domain name where a competitor of yours has the dot com, but you can get a dot net or a dot org or something like that.
My third recommendation is don’t add hyphens. Sometimes people look at the way to get their domain name is to go add hyphens. So if the name of my business were VIP Trash, instead of going for VIP Trash Service, and assuming, as it is, VIPTrash.com is taken and only available if I want to spend about $5,000, a lot of companies would go, well, let’s do VIP-Trash. Well, the problem with that is no one thinks to add a dash when they’re typing in your domain name. So adding dash just confuses your customer and makes it more likely that they’re going to go to the non-dash version. Avoid that at all costs, in my opinion.
The last thing I want to recommend is where do I buy that domain at? My answer may surprise you, but I don’t particularly care where, other than that I want to make sure you buy it at a domain name reseller that has been around for many years and will likely be around for many, many years. I personally use GoDaddy, some clients don’t, some people use others, and that’s okay. Network Solutions is another great choice, and I’m sure there are many, many others. But find one that you like, that’s been around for a long time, open an account, it’s free to do, and then register all of your relevant domain names with that same domain registrar.
Then, by the way, as a point of bonus, don’t lose that password. Don’t let your receptionist go out and get your password and use her personal email to register that account under. Because some day, if she no longer works for the company, you will not have access to that domain name, and that is going to be very impactful, because your domain name is tied to your website and your email and probably other things as well. So make sure that that’s a safe and secure password and that that log-in is maintained by somebody on your leadership team.
Simple and easy. So in summary, how do we pick a domain name?
- We pick a domain name that’s memorable. Don’t try to be short. Short is less important than memorable.
- Try to buy a dot com, not a dot org or a dot net or a dot guru or a dot expert. Buy a dot com.
- Avoid dashes. Don’t buy domain names with dashes, they simply confuse your audience.
- Wherever you buy your domain name from, don’t lose the account log-in because it’s going to be really important for you to have in the future.
If you’ve got questions about domain names, I’d love to chat with you, and I’d be happy to do so. Just contact me, my information is at the end of the video.
Thanks, and make it a great day.
