In 1993, when the web was still in its infancy, Bill Fisher had the opportunity to acquire an extremely attractive domain: www.beer.com. Later, Bill sold this domain to Labatt, a Canadian beer company, for an undisclosed price that certainly had to be in the seven-figure range.
As a professional domain broker, Bill also snagged several other desirable domains like www.budweiser.com and www.guinness.com, fully aware that copyright laws might come into play. To avoid a courtroom dispute, Anheuser-Busch, the beer company, chose to sweeten the deal by filling Fisher’s office with beer to convince him to relinquish the Budweiser domain. The Guinness domain was even more lucrative, as it allowed Fisher and his friends a free trip to Ireland to visit the brewery, along with an ample supply of beer that lasted for months.
If you want to succeed on the web today, you need a memorable domain name. Unfortunately, registering such a domain is not easy, as large corporations and domain speculators like Bill have long snatched up all the “hot” names.
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| Source: BusinessWeek |
Some companies are forced to settle for searching for similar domain names with extensions like “.biz” or “.net” when the “.com” domain they want has already been taken. However, two significant issues arise here.
First, the “.com” suffix is the default for all current browsers – meaning that if you only type part of a web address, the browser will automatically append “.com” to it. Second, major search engines like Google and Yahoo prioritize “.com” domains before considering other extensions.
“Compared to .com, the value of all other domain extensions is lower,” says Mark Goldstein, president of the International Research Center. “No suffix has been able to replace .com, simply because users aren’t in the habit of typing those addresses into their browsers.”
If you absolutely need to have “.com” in your domain name, as a mandatory action, you must be creative. Make sure your domain contains keywords that are most relevant to the products or services your company offers. Don’t hesitate to try names that have 3, 4, or even 5 words connected together.
Common words will attract more attention than obscure terms – which is why Google has launched a useful service http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExernal to track the most popular search keywords.
For example, if you own a shoe store in Atlanta, try typing “Atlanta shoe stores” into Google and sorting the search results by popularity. You will find that the most searched phrases are “Atlanta shoes“, “Atlanta shoe“, “Atlanta dance shoes“, and “Atlanta shoe stores“. From this evidence, you should select the most appealing version for your domain, whether it be www.atlantashoes.com or www.atlantashoestores.com.
Once you have chosen a domain that you like, you will need to pay to acquire it. Domain prices typically range from $7 to $15 per year, depending on the provider. If possible, you should also purchase 3 to 20 similar domains or those that are easily confused with your main domain to ensure that customers end up in the right place regardless of how they type it.
However, with 105 million domains currently in use, there is no guarantee that the domain you choose won’t be “taken” by someone else. (You can check at www.domaintools.com). If you are truly set on a particular domain, you may have to pay significantly more to speculators like Bill Fisher mentioned earlier. In this secondary market, buyers negotiate directly with sellers.
But whether you create an entirely new domain or buy one from someone else, the important thing is how you will manage that domain. The smartest strategy is to leverage search engines to elevate your presence, rather than struggling to move mountains alone.
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