Finding A Domain Name

When looking for a domain name, usually the best first step is making a list of words. Think of words relating to:

• Your Business Name

• Your Industry

• Words like course, membership, academy, etc... if that's what you sell

• Positive words like quality, best, top, first, etc...

Don't eliminate words yet just make a list of as many words as you can. You can also use tools like these to find more words:

• Visuwords

• Thesaurus.com

Once you have a long list of words, you can then start to make domain names out of them.

You can use NameCheap's Domain Search tool to enter in your words so you can get a list of available names.Visit: namecheap.pxf.io/eKgOJO

It is recommended you search for available .com domain names as .com is the most popular, commonly used and easiest to remember domain name extension. To search for available .com domains, under Search 1184 TLDs, click on the word Popular and under Popular, click com so it becomes highlighted. If you have words to go before or after the main word or words in your domain, you can click the toggle box after Append Prefix/Suffix and add words that can go before or after your domain. We recommend NameCheap and DomainDiscount24.net as a domain name registrars.

Here are some suggestions for how to narrow down the available domain names and choose one.

Numbers

It is recommended your domain doesn't include numbers (people get confused between the number 1 or the text spelled out as one for example). If you really want to use a number, you can see if both variations of domain name are available (spelled out and as the number) and register both.

Dashes

It is not recommended to use dashes in your domain name because it is slower to say dash or hypen every time you say your domain name and easy for someone to forget the dash.

Foreign Characters 

Not everyone has a foreign keyboard or knows how to type a foreign character so it's recommended unless you are exclusively serving that foreign market where most everyone has a keyboard supporting those characters to not use those characters in your domain name.

Relevant 

It is recommended your words are relevant to you and your business and not for a completely unrelated industry which may be confusing to your customers/clients.

Memorable

Make sure your words are memorable. Using long sequences of numbers in your domain for example make the domain hard to remember.

Easy To Spell

Some words are difficult to spell. Try to avoid using them in your domain unless they are extremely relevant to your industry.

Words Within Name

Sometimes putting words together spells out unintentional words. Look for any words like curse words that are formed from the last few characters of a word and the first few characters of the next word in a domain name.

Popular Words

You can use a tool like Google Trends - https://trends.google.com/trends to see how popular words are compared to other words.

Popular Wikipedia Pages

Similar To Google Trends, you can search words, terms, concepts and find relevant Wikipedia pages using https://www.wikishark.com/ and see what kind of traffic they are getting to compare words and phrases to each other.

Trademarks

Before registering a domain name, see if the combination of words in your domain name are trademarked. You can search for trademarks at: http://tess2.uspto.gov/

Business Name Availability

You can search the corporate website for your state or the state you want to incorporate in to make sure the name you’ve found is available to register as a business name.

Social Media Availability

You can use a tool like https://www.username.social/ to search for a potential domain name together as all one word (without the extension like .com) to see if it is available as a username on various social media websites.

Past Website Use

You can use a website like https://archive.org/ to see past versions of websites that used to be on that domain (if any).

If you don't like the suggestions

Domain names have to be renewed yearly. Every day people forget to renew or abandon their domain names. You can search for expired domain names on a site like https://justdropped.com/. You can also search through closeout/bargain bin domains for sale on: https://auctions.godaddy.com/?t=5.