This post originally appeared at BusinessTips.com.
Back in the old days of naming, before the Internet was invented, all you needed to worry about was making sure your product or company name was legally available – that you could trademark it. Apple, as an arbitrary name for a computer company, was easy to trademark – but they didn’t even register apple.com until 1987.
Many clients who come to Catchword needing a new name want the exact .com domain too. Most of the time we can deliver, by coming up with unique names like Altegrity, Crazy 8, or Vudu. But sometimes, like with the Palm Pre, the exact domain isn’t necessary – Palm didn’t need pre.com, and were happy to use palmpre.com while the product was on the market. But how do you know when you need it, and which kind of domain is necessary?
Here’s a quick overview of domains. In the beginning (1985), there were three domain extensions:
.com, for commercial enterprises
.net, for internet service providers
.org, for non-profit organizations
(There were actually three more – .mil, .edu, and .gov, but you don’t need to worry about those unless you’re starting your own university or your own country.)
The .com extension was really the only option for businesses, and 25 years later, it’s still far and away the most desirable domain. Over the years new domains have been introduced in an effort to create more internet real estate, including .biz for business – but none of them have made a dent in the ubiquity of .com. Of course there are country-specific domains, too, like .co.uk, .fr, and .jp, for example, and they are in use in their native countries, but everyone who has a country domain would love to have the .com too. There is a .us domain, but it’s rarely used. Ever done business with a company using a .us domain?
So you want a .com domain for your new name. To find one that’s available, you should start with a long list of name candidates you like – never just one or two! Two hundred is a better bet. Murphy’s Law of naming says that the more you like a name, the less available it’s likely to be. The awful truth is that almost any domain you want has already been registered – in fact, every word in a typical dictionary has already been registered. So if you’re favorite name is, say Snacktives, you should have many more that would work for you too – like Snaction, Snacktivity, or Snackalackin.
With your list in hand, the first thing you need to do is to check if they’re registered or not. Checking is free and easy – you just need to type your domain into a service like http://checkdomain.com or http://domaintools.com. If your preferred name is already registered, don’t despair! Many registered domains are what we call potentially purchasable – that is, the domain owner is willing to sell it. Sometimes a domain will be listed as “for sale” and all you need to do it click through to the sales site, usually one like Sedo.com or Afternic.com. Catchword has sold and purchased many domains through these services – they are fast, easy, and trustworthy.
If you negotiate with a domain owner directly, you should probably use an online service like Escrow.com to keep everything transparent on both sides. Escrow.com will hold the money until the domain is released to the buyer. It’s a polite way of making sure no one cheats.
Figuring out the value of a domain is tricky. Like a piece of art, it’s worth what someone is willing to pay for it – so partly, it depends on how much money you have. Real word domains are generally worth more than coined words, and short words are more valuable than long ones – they’re easier to type and remember. There are a few websites that can help you establish a ballpark price – for free! Try http://estibot.com/ or http://domainindex.com/.
But what if you don’t have the money to buy a domain? Well, one popular strategy is to modify your name in some way. Take Catchword, for example – someone else owns the domain catchword.com and isn’t ready to sell it to us yet, so we decided that catchwordbranding.com was just as good. We developed the company name Awareness for a B2B social networking building company, and they decided that awarenessnetworks.com would work just fine for them. Especially for a company that markets to other businesses, the exact .com domain is not a necessity. So, if you can’t have snacktives.com, maybe snacktivefoods.com would work.
Once you’ve registered your domain, I’d recommend you set it to auto-renew – you don’t want to lose your domain because you forgot to renew it! Don’t laugh – it happens. Symantec forgot to renew its Norton.com domain, and Microsoft once forgot to renew Passport.com. And even Google – Google! – forgot to renew its German domain, google.de, in 2007.
Now you’ve got your domain – but don’t forget to trademark your name too. Owning a domain is not the same as a trademark! Registering a domain doesn’t give you the same rights to a name as a trademark, and holding a trademark doesn’t give you rights to a domain name – most of the time. If you trademark a name, and later someone else registers that name as a domain and then tries to sell it to you for an exorbitant price, you may have the right to get them to turn it over to you. But if there’s a registered domain that you just really, really want, there isn’t any way to force someone to give it or sell it to you.
To sum up:
- Create a long list of possible name candidates
- Check them for domain availability (and likely none of them will be)
- Decide if you want to try to buy one, or modify one
- Register it at a reputable domain registrar like BulkRegister
- Set it to auto-renew
- File for a trademark, if you haven’t already
- Build your website and go!
And, if your business idea doesn’t work out, you can always sell that domain on Sedo.com.