You need a home.
And so does your business.
If you are going to treat your self-employment seriously, you will need to find the perfect location to build on.
Location, Location, Location
Ask any professional Realtor
You want to be in the “right” neighborhood and the “right” school district.
The same holds true with your domain name. The location of your site, aka your domain name, is all about being the “right” or “perfect” one.
Is your domain name going to exist in a city? An industrial park? A converted home?
Or put differently, is your site going to have a corporate feel, like XYZcompany.com or a more personal feel, like EricSGale.com?
The Power of .COM
Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are the core group of domains consists of the com, info, net, and org domains
There more than 1500 of domain extensions (gTLDs). The most popular one is .COM.
When looking for a gTLD, try using https://www.whois.com/whois/ when looking for your desired name.
Simply click on that link, and enter your desired domain name. Initially, my business was web design. I used my initials, ESG, and the word graphics. I did web graphics. So I picked ESGgraphics.com. The domain was available, so I bought it.
Most people are conditioned to type in a name and the .COM gTLD. Remember the Expedia.COM jingle?
Be Memorable
Your domain name needs to be easy to pronounce and spell. In other words, it needs to be memorable.
Whether you decide to use your business name, a phrase associated with your brand, or your name, you want people to easily remember it and how to spell it.
You might write and sell products about dry humor. Having a website WryWrittenWords.com is a .COM domain but isn’t the easiest to remember or spell. Silent letters can be a killer.
Shorter is Better
The majority of TLDs are limited to 63 characters. That means you can’t register a domain with over 63 characters.
Besides, having a long domain name breaks the previous rule of being memorable.
Will you remember this domain? Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.org.uk
Probably not. It is a real domain.
This has 70 characters (63 characters plus the .org.uk).
We can remember IBM.com, GE.com, CNN.com with ease. Google.com or FoxNews.com are a bit longer but we can remember them.
Displaying Your Domain Name
If you have more than one word in your domain name, make it easier to remember by using Camel Case. Camel Case uses a Captial letter for each word in a sentence or in our case, a domain name.
You might have noticed that I wrote out EricSGale.com to emphasize the E, S, and G. In FoxNews.com I made it easier to see the two words in the domain name.
So even if you go with a relatively long domain name like ThisIsMyDomainName.com it is easy for people to read and remember since it breaks up the words and they can read it as a sentence.
Be sure to type out your domain name in Camel Case whenever you use it. The site will still work if people do not type it in with Camel Case, we are just trying to make it easy for them to remember the domain.
Use Keywords In Your Domain Name
If you plan to write about a difficult topic, you might not want to go with a corporate name, the name of your LLC, or your personal name.
If you are coaching people through divorce recovery, you might go with YourDivorceCoach.com (currently for sale for $2995+).
Your domain name has the keywords divorce and coach. Someone experiencing divorce might be looking for someone to help them through the process and after the divorce is final.
Press Your Luck
Hopefully you don’t get stuck but if you do, try a domain name generator.
Generators will ask you to enter a few words (2-4) and then will randomly generate names for you. Please note, they typically will open us a link to a domain registrar and will try to get you to buy the domains right away.
THINGS TO AVOID
Avoid hyphens. While it is easy to type Eric-S-Gale.com, try saying it out loud. Eric hyphen S hyphen Gale.com. People will not remember to add the hyphen(s).
Avoid numbers. You help people plan for weekend excursions. Do you go with 3dayvacation or threedayvacations? Unless you buy both and redirect one to the other, don’t use numbers.
Avoid trademarked names (CFP, Realtor, etc.) This should be a no brainer but people will try to buy domains that have trademarked names.
When Pat Flynn passed the LEED exam, he set up a site to sell his notes and other materials. The site was called, InTheLEED.com. The problem was, LEED was trademarked. He had to hire a lawyer and make some pivots in his business because he violated the trademarked and was cease and desist letter from the U.S. Green Building Council’s attorneys, the owner of the trademark.
Avoid Homophones. Do you remember your earliest English classes? Probably not. Homophones are two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings and/or spelling. Some examples are “Two, To, Too”; “There, Their, They’re” and “flour and flower.”
