If you want to make money online more quickly, choose your domain name wisely. Domain names that help you make money can be hard to come by just on the name alone. A few of the obvious domain names that make money are insurance.com, realestate.com, and bible.com. Yet, domain names that make money can be a lot easier to find, and a whole lot cheaper than names like these. You might come up with a 'catchy' name like SmartRags.com for a cool clothing website. It's not necessarily a common name, but catchy enough that it can be remembered, and it's easy to spell - two words - smart and rags.
Domain names that make money are most often the ones that are easiest to remember, like SmartRags.com for instance, but if someone were to spell the name SmartRagz.com with a "Z" at the end, it would not be so successful since it is not a normal spelling of the word 'rags'. Here is another example but where the domain names are much longer, yet still memorable. The truth is, a good domain name might very well be a longer domain than even a few short words. It could quite possibly be a descriptive phrase that someone might type in a search engine to find something. Examples of these might be like "chiropractors in Charleston" (chiropractorsincharleston.com), "auto repair shop in Atlanta" (autorepairshopinatlanta.com), or "women's legal services" (womenslegalservices.com).
You might be surprised to learn that having a name like insurance.com or realestate.com, as short and as sweet as they are, are not the only kinds of domain names that get a lot of attention. If you want domain names that make money, you will need to spend a little more time in finding them. I own over 100 domains - not that I will ever use them, but I just liked the names and thought they were catchy. Yet, you can make money in unsuspecting ways with domains that don't even relate to what you are selling, IF they can get ranked well. After all, top page rankings are what you want, right?
Of course, it should go without saying that your choice for a domain name should be both descriptive and memorable. It is an absolute must unless you are planning to have an aggressive online marketing strategy to promote it. Take our domain name for instance - SDWard.com. It is the short version of my original name, SDWardCompany.com. I mean, by shortening it, people would not have to type out the whole domain name with 'company' attached to it - S.D. Ward versus S. D. Ward Company. Makes sense, right? Sadly for me, neither of these names have really anything that sticks out other than my name in them. And, I mean, how many S. D. Ward's could there be in the world?
Would you believe over 25,000,000 or so references to my name - yes, over 25 MILLION from a Google search. I tried S. D. Ward, SD Ward, and S D Ward ... it didn't matter. Even if someone typed in my name, there is really no great hope someone actually finding my Website out of the millions of other references to my name. I remember when we first changed our name over to S. D. Ward & Associates and dropped the 'company' off of our domain name, our Website was buried on something like page 11,500 and something on Google. Not exactly top page rankings, huh? It could have been worse though. I used to own DavidWard.com, but let it lapse years ago (by accident). Bad mistake, but as for number of instances online, SD Ward paled in comparison to the number of references to David Ward which had over 40 million references.
If you are one of those who don't fully understand the hopelessness of a domain being buried 1500 pages away from the first page of google search results for S. D. Ward, it simply meant that unless someone typed in my actual domain name "www.sdward.com," I would never be found by anyone who was looking for me. I was completely off the map for getting found when I first launched sdward.com as a teaching and coaching Website. I would have had better success in getting traffic to my website by sticking flyers on windshields than to have someone find my website using Google.
Anyway, I felt that I was destined to be beat out in page rankings by someone else named S. D. Ward that was no doubt one of my distant Ward relatives that have populated the earth like rabbits. In my defense, the truth be told, most company names are just not real powerful in getting organically ranked with search engines based just on their domain name alone, so the average business owner must work to build page rankings through content and related strategies such as proper indexing, linking and SEO, as well as through that of having a personal or business branding strategy that will drive traffic to their site beyond that of just search engine traffic. There are other smarter ways to generate traffic to a Website than using a generic company name as a domain name. Our rankings for S. D. Ward have improved significantly, but then I digress here.
If you are open to considering a slightly different and somewhat unorthodox approach to gaining exposure on the Internet without having to pay big bucks to do it, consider the following tips and ideas the next time you are thinking about buying some domain names:
1) Word of Caution as my number one step! Be careful where you search for your domains when doing research, especially if you do not plan to buy right away. There are some domain registrars (will not mention names here) who skim search queries from their domain search pages and if the domain someone is checking on has potential, they will purchase it through a dummy company or third party who works for the registrar, and then turn around and put it up for sale to the highest bidder it there is an interest in the domain by more than one party. This trend is growing as domains become more and more scarse.
2) Write out a list of short questions that start with 'how to' and 'where to' that relate to your business. If you are in the pet industry, you might have a question like, "how to research pedegrees' or 'where to find non toxic pet shampoos' or 'how to trim a cats claws' or 'where to find a cat casserole recipe' (juuust kidding). These questions that you have come up with may very well be the very questions that an average Internet user might type into a search engine who has the need of finding this information, i.e. www.howtoresearchpedegrees.com or www.wheretofindnontoxicpetshampoos.com.
4) If you like the numbers you see in page references as well as average monthly searches for the phrases you have chosen, take the time to do a domain search for those phrases. Here is why. One of the very first rules in the Google ranking process is the relevance of a domain name to the actual search inquiry done by someone searching for that phrase, i.e. 'where to find a cat casserole recipe' (no, not really... please don't be searching for this). If that key phrase is available, you are on to something that could bring several thousand people to your website if you apply even a few of the other general rules that Google (and other search engines use to rank pages). I personally recommend smartycatdomains.com because of their commitment to give 50% of their profits to causes that help, encourage and empower single moms (one of the highest densities of those living at or below the poverty-level).
5) Once you have purchased the domain, the rest is pretty straight forward. You want to host it with a company you feel offers the best product to promote your Website for the money. One big precaution is to watch out for those cheap "UNlimited" sorts of accounts until you have read the fine print. They are NOT unlimited, and you could very easily have your site either suspended for too much use or have your credit card charged a penalty for abusive use of the system. Hint: Unlimited bandwidth does not mean unlimited data transfer (what happens when people visit your Website and your Website downloads to their computer). Bandwidth is how many people can visit your Website at one time without crashing your site or slowing it down considerably. Big difference!
In closing, most of us have heard the old adage, "It's all in the name." When it comes to choosing the right descriptive domain name that will give you faster and better page rankings, this descriptive domain name, fast traffic building strategy, may be just what you need to get paying customers to your Website. Just make sure you have something to offer or sell them when they show up!
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