Choosing a Domain Name

Optional Business Models

Many web-based businesses fail because they do not have a functional business model. Before you even choose a name for your site you should know your target audience, what you intend to sell to them, and what will make your business idea unique or different than everything else that is already on the market.

You can still make significant profits without being sure what you want to sell if you can solve large problems and make life easier for a group of targeted people. At any level, you still have to know your goals and the reasons why you are creating a site. What makes your site different than the millions of sites already published?

My first few sites failed because they had no functional business models. They added little value to the web. That is not to say that I didn’t learn from them, because I did, but they led me to creating this one. If you are uncertain of yourself, don’t be afraid to create multiple channels just to try them out. If you know you want to do something for the long run, you may want to spend a bit of timewatching the marketplace before pouring too much effort into making a huge site that is hard to update.

SEOBook.com has done exceptionally well, and it has even revived the value and business models of some of my other sites. The single biggest thing I have going for me is the social currency my blog has created.

A Horrible Domain Idea

Some people think it is incredibly important to have keywords in a domain. People purchase domains like look-4-buy-cheap-discount-viagra-online-pharmacy.com. This is a horrible domain name!

An exact matching domain name in a competitive market can be seen by Google as a signal of quality since acquiring one would either indicate that you were early to the market or paid a premium for the URL. Some strong .com names sell for millions of dollars, while associated .net and .org domains can range from a few hundred dollars to a hundred thousand dollars.

If your site exhibits a number of strong brand related characteristics, such as high search volume for brand related keywords, high clickthrough rate for core brand related searches, many repeat visitors, or relevant matching URL and/or anchor text, there is a good chance that Google will place a set of Sitelinks in the search results for brand related search queries.Keywords in the domain name may help some (as people tend to link to websites using their official names as the link text), but if I were going to create a long-term business, I would put brand above keyword-rich, unless you can find a name that exactly matched your core keywords or something that allows you to leverage both assets.

If you are creative, you usually can get keywords in the domain while keeping it short, memorable, fairly brandable, and free of hyphens.