Domainer's Names: A Premium Domain Portfolio

Internet addresses are actually numbers. The domain name system allows us to give these numerical based addresses site names in our own language, making them easier to remember and more descriptive.

Domain names then become a great branding opportunity. Many businesses own several names to protect their personal and business names, Trademarks, Sevice Marks, brands and slogans.

As a brand and identity expert, a registrar and web host myself (Domainance, Domain Hostmaster, HD Web Hosting, Apache Website Hosting and others), and even a registrar reseller (Domainants, W3DN & Symbiotic Design), I know that the most important decision is the first, securing a great domain name that will resonate positively with customers and clientel.

GoDaddy is the world's largest registrar, boasting 13 million customers with 60 million names. That means that their average customer holds 4 domains or more.

What's in a name? Your whole presence has previously been tied to marketing a name, establishing a brand. It is no different online, a website acts like a 24 hour per day salesman guiding customers to your products and/or services. The domain name gets them there, and becomes a professional identity, just like the company logo and the business name.

Before you even have a website, you need a good name. I do strongly urge you to register your business name, so that other people won't, allowing you to protect it. But, there are other measures for a good domain name.

Long domain names are not easy to remember, easier to mistype. No domain name should be over 21 characters long, preferably less than 16, but 18 or less is good.

Domains should not be numerical, unless it reflects something specific. However, a zipcode or area code is a good idea if the website reflects that local, like a local magazine. But numbers are not normally easy to translate in domains.

A good domain name will pass the telephone test. Call up your wife, husband, son, daughter or friend. If they can understand your pronounciation of the domain name and write it down correctly,

Also, unless your logo has a hyphen in it, I would steer completely away from domain names with any hyphens in them, unless you live in Germany (Duetschland). Hyphened domains are usually rip-offs of someone else's domain, except in Gernany, where they are preferred as an alternate to a space. Also, hyphened domain names are harder to communicate by word of mouth, and harder to promote in ad copy because the hyphen can cause the name to break in half to the next line. And a domain with more than one hyphen in it is often considered to be a throw-away domain that spammers use, by certain search engines and directories that don't even allow them listed.

Also, avoid misspelled words. And try to stay clear of words that end in one character and start the next word with the same letter, like austinneckties.com. These names are easily typoed because of how we think when we type.

The most important thing is to keep your domain name short and sweet, easy to remember, hopefully descriptive or with a positive spin on your business or brand.

Domain names have become easier to register now. At first, everyone in America was stuck with .com, .net and .org as choices for the global Top Level Domain (gTLD) name extensions. Most businesses selected .com because it was the COMmercial website standard. But that meant that better names were harder to get in the .com registry because corporations would register every dictionary word, every 3, 4 or 5 letter acronym.

The .us ccTLD (country code top level domain) extension is an option for the U.S.A., but that extension is limited to individuals and businesses with a U.S. presence. Since its not a gTLD (generic/global top level domain) name extension, it may not be a good choice for a business who wants a global presence and sell internationally.

That's what lead to some of us little guys jumping in the game, just trying to get a few good names for ourselves or our clients before they were all gone. After all, I couldn't design and host a client website if they couldn't establish a good brand. Then, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which maintains the internet's infrastructure) introduced the .biz and .info registries. These extensions were OK, but .info was really for information websites, and the funny spelling of .biz was a little too funny for serious businesses.

Some countries decided to make their country code domain name extension available for registration by the worldwide public. The .ws registry is a country code for Western Samoa that was marketed as short for WebSite. Columbia makes its .co registry available for anyone at a price.

However, starting in 2013 and finally getting going in 2014, ICANN has been releasing hundreds of new gTLD domain name extensions. Some of my favorites are .design, .domains, .website, .site, .top, .agency, .associates, .boutique, .business, .center, .city, .company, .country, .digital, .education, .enterprises, .farm, .fashion, .football, .gallery, .global, .healthcare, .help, .international, .jewelry, .kim, .lawyer, .live, .love, .market, .marketing, .men, .nyc, .one, .online, .photography, .photos, .pictures, .productions, .properties, .racing, .red, .repair, .rocks, .rodeo, .sale, .services, .sexy, .singles, .social, .software, .space, .team, .technology, .tips, .tools, .toys, .trade, .university, .uno, .ventures, .video, .vision, .work, .xyz, .yoga, .zone, and that is only a small sampling of the available domain name extensions out there.

So, now there are a ton of more options available for finding the right name. However, there are some drawbacks to how ICANN is doing this. The first is that these new extensions are usually double the price of a .com or .net registration, often quadruple the price or even more. There are a few exections, such as .top, .club, and .pictures, which remain priced competitively against .com and .net. But ICANN has seen how domainers such as those big corporations, as well as speculators such as myself will sell good names for a premium price. So, ICANN actually reserves special keyword domain names and charges more for them.

Now, I can understand ICANN getting greedy and wanting to cash in, but ICANN doesn't just charge a just for the registration of a premium keyword domain, it also charges for the renewal, every single year, for the life of the domain name. Which is why the new ICANN Era domain name extensions kind of suck.

A .com or .net is just about $10.25 USD a year to register and renew every year. But .accountants is $94.79 USD a year to register and $94.79 USD each and every year to renew. ...WTF?