I’ve never been quite sure which direction I wanted to take this blog – should I blog about the music industry, the start up scene or just personal stuff? I’m still not 100% sure, but at least I have a little direction now. Loosely inspired by Eric Ries’ ‘Start Up Lessons Learned’ blog, I decided I can offer some tips and wisdom to those starting out since I have some experience on the front lines. In fact, I’m currently there now. For you musicians who may read my blog, a lot of these lessons will apply to your career, as well.
I thought I would start out with a basic lesson learned, but far from easy – choosing a name for your web venture. You’re not just choosing a name, but you’re trying to find a name that’s also available as a dot com. Picking right name is tough enough, but it’s availability as an online domain makes it twice as hard. To spare you some aggravation and common mistakes, here are some guidelines that will point you in the right direction.
- ALWAYS a ‘.com’ – There are a lot of domain extension options (.net, .org, etc.), but unless you have the money for professional branding, ‘.com’ is the way to go, ALWAYS. The reason is because ‘.com’ is ingrained into our heads. If someone tells us the name of a web site, we immediately think ‘.com’ unless we’re told otherwise. The down side to this is that everyone else in the world wants a ‘.com’ too, so you have your work cut out for you in that department. Creativity is the key here, because more often than not your first choice of a name will probably not be available as a ‘.com’. What about using the extension to spell the name(ie: Del.icio.us, or God forbid, Plugo.la)? From experience (I operate Plugo.la), I can tell you this is NOT a good way to go, unless you’re completely out of options. If I’m talking to someone face-to-face, I usually end up having to go into deep explanation on what a person needs to type-in to get to the site. The most common response I get is, “So, there’s no dot com then”? Even people online sometimes type-in plugola.com first. Trust me when I say, it’s not worth the hassle. If you’re not sure where to register your domain name, I would say GoDaddy is probably the easiest and slightly cheaper than most other registrars. Personally, I mainly use DirectNIC; mostly because that’s who I’ve always used and all my domains are parked there. I like it because it’s light on all the flashy design and very simple.
- Check Social Media Availability – To complicate things even further, it has now become important that your name also be available on the social media sites (ie: Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for communication and branding. When I’m choosing a name, I use a free service to check it against all the big social media web sites called, NameChk. You don’t need to worry about every single social service available out there. Just focus on the big boys and/or where you feel it’s important to have a presence. You may have to get a little creative here too if your first choice(s) is not available. I noticed some people who couldn’t get the name they’re looking for they’ll add a little something extra to their name. As an example, instead of ‘MyName’ you may have to register something like, ‘MyNameCom’.
- Keep it Easy & Catchy – Creative, yes; complicated, no. If you put too much into a name people will have a hard time remembering it. You would be surprised how forgetful people can be (myself included), especially when you’re just starting out and you’re unimportant in most people’s eyes. Coming up with name that’s easy to spell and has a little ring or zing to it can really help in the long run. When Google launched, the name was easy to spell and remember. From the first day I visited Google, I never forgot the name and most of the time I still type it in manually to this day. However, it’s very tough to acquire a good one word domain these days, but not entirely impossible. I would suggest that you should try to do your best and limit your name to no more than two words. Anything more than that, unless it’s band or product name, it’s just too complicated for the masses to remember.
- Abbreviations & Misspellings – Once you have finally landed on a name that’s right for you, it can’t hurt you to register any misspellings, abbreviations or even shortcuts of the name. The freshest example I can think of is Overstock.com’s recent shortcut URL announcement. The public can still reach them going to overstock.com, but their new shortcut url is simply, ‘O.co’. It’s pretty tough to get a better abbreviation/shortcut than that! If you think that there may be some people who could easily misspell your name, it’s not a bad idea to register that misspelling and have it redirect to the correct name. For example, if the name of your start up/web site is Pharmacy.com, you might want to register Farmacy.com, too.
- Keyword Domain Names – This is when you register a domain using keywords/phrases of what your site or company represents. This is usually done to rank higher on the search engines and it DOES work. However, I would highly recommend against using any keyword domain as your brand/company’s main web site or name. It usually looks very unprofessional and could easily be interpreted as ’scammy’ or ’shady’. Personally, I do this from time to time to bring in additional search engine traffic, but I never use them as my main landing page.
I’ve been buying up domains for various ventures and reasons for over 10 years now and this is my basic checklist for each domain name I register. I’ve made some expensive mistakes over the years and hopefully these tips will prevent you from doing the same.