Don’t Make These Mistakes When Choosing a Domain Name

Picking the right premium domains for your startup is one of the important decisions that can make or break your business venture. Consider this: Jeff Bezos had initially planned to name his E-com venture Cadabra. Thankfully, sense prevailed, when someone suggested that the name isn’t so good. Picking the right premium domains for your startup name is important because you will also need a corresponding domain name.

Picking premium domains that differ from your business name can be a costly mistake:

It took ten years for Elon Musk to own tesla.com. The domain name was initially owned by a Silicon Valley engineer who had owned it for twenty-four years. Meanwhile, the domain name Nissan.com isn’t owned by the Japanese auto giant. The company has to use ccTLDs like Nissan.usa, Nissan.co.jp, etc. Similarly, Yahoo had a pay a hefty price to acquire the domain name flicker.com to make up for the loss of traffic from flickr.com. Bottom line – pick a domain name that’s the same as your company name.

Keep it simple and straightforward:

When it comes to picking domain names, the logic is as clear as day. The name should be simple, easy to understand, and easy to remember. Yes, it should be short, but not very short. Pick domain names that are easy to spell – don’t use numbers of hyphens unless you are sure about what you want. Of course, unconventional names like Google, Yahoo, etc. have been successful, but you’ll have to spend a fortune towards branding.

Stick to dot com as much as you can:

Dotcom domain names are believed by users to be trustworthy. Look for the .com variation when you can. While these are premium domain names and hence expensive, with a little help from professional domain brokers, it’s now easy to buy a domain name.