ITI E-Commerce 

Back

Tips on Selecting a Domain Name

Make it as short as possible. You are going to want people to remember your domain, and when it comes to memory, the shorter the better (grin). ITImarketplace.com will stay with people longer than InternationalTeamworksIncorporatedReallyHugeSavingsOnEverything.com.

Be descriptive of your business. Try to register a name which describes your product or service. If you are primarily trying to recruit new ITI Reps., you might choose ClickHereToRetire.com. For phone cards it might be dialing-4-less.com.

Put yourself in the user's shoes. Remember, at least some of the people reaching your ITI site through your new domain will have no idea who you are. If your name is Mary Smith and you want to promote the ITI mall, you will get better results registering ITIrealSavings.com than MarySmithsMall.com.

Aural-Sense. Does the name you have chosen contain words which sound like other words or which have more than one spelling? If you register ShoppingFare.com will people who you tell about your site go home and type in ShoppingFare.com or ShoppingFair.com? Will Whether-to-buy-or-not.com sound to some like Weather-two-bi-oar-knot.com? OK, that was an extreme example, but you get the idea.

Easy to spell. If your name is Miriamisi Uschuneistervich you probably do not want to use your name as a business domain. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to remember your domain.

Your Own Niche. Consider registering domains which may stress less popular products for which there is less competition. If a million people are trying to attract business to Internet malls but only three people are promoting Blue Beanie Babies, you may actually make more money by going after a small niche product.

COM, NET, or ORG ? 
Originally, com, net, and org stood for commercial, network, and organization. This line  has blurred quite a bit and .COM has clearly become the domain of choice, much like "1-800" is the area code of choice for toll-free numbers. If at all possible, your main site should be a .COM. If you register a .net, .org, or an international domain (such as .cx) as your main site, you will actually be sending a percentage of your traffic to whoever owns the .com. Think about it, would you rather have 1-800-FLOWERS or 1-877-FLOWERS ? You can be sure that a company that owned and advertised "call us toll-free at 1-877-FLOWERS  " would be sending some of their business to 1-800-FLOWERS unintentionally.

Make a list and refine it. The whois feature of DotAnything will help you build a list of available names as you type them in. You can then select or deselect names using the update button. This allows you to build up a list of domain name candidates and then "distill it down", add to it, "distill it down" again until you have refined a list of strong candidates for registration. There is no charge for this, and you may want to practice name-finding before committing to registrations. To access this feature go to the front of your ITI replicating webpage.

Good Luck!
The DotAnything Team