How to get the perfect .COM domain on a budget
The first step when launching a business online is securing a brilliant domain. There are many major domain registrars like GoDaddy or Google Domains, and they all provide the same essential function.
A domain registrar is taking your money to tell ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that you own a domain. The actual fee charged by ICANN is less than a dollar, so you’re paying a huge margin to keep these services alive.
Many registrars, for example Namecheap, let you bid on domains owned by others, or auction domains you already own at a price you set yourself. They also reserve or register “premium” domains, so they can sell it at a higher price point.
This is why searching for “brandingshop.com” on Google Domains shows as unavailable, but on Namecheap it costs a whopping $12,900.
I’ve given this background information to explain how we got where we are today. In the .COM market, supposedly the best domains are owned by prescient hustlers who bought things like shop.online and want to resell it for $150,000.
To a new business owner, or a small branding studio, you might find yourself frustrated with the insane costs to get a simple domain, and domain hacking services or available name generators produce bizarre results like “instacoffeeshoply” which is too silly, too low value, and behind trend.
Step 1: Define your keywords.
Are you a local coffee shop? A small Shopify store specialized in drop shipping knitwear? A creative agency focused on medical services?
You need a list of keywords associated with your business. These are all the elements that your brand is associated with.
The local coffee shop would have keywords like bean, roast, espresso, cafe, coffee, aroma, mug, black, milk, sugar, hot, cold, beverage. There are also location keywords as the business is physical. These are cities, streets, and neighborhoods like Austin, Texas, etc.
The knitwear drop shipper would have keywords like knit, handmade, direct, yarn, comfort, hat, beanie, winter, custom, boutique, hand, home, homemade.
The creative agency serving medical clients would have keywords like brand, design, medical, pharmaceutical, hospital, doctor, lab, testing, patient, informative.
Step 2: Choose a name rooted in form or function.
You can take two different approaches to the name here. You can prioritize form by creating a combined term, but this sacrifices a bit of function as you’re introducing an unknown term to the universe.
A combined name is the combination of two, sometimes three, keywords to create a new term.
Combined names are often silly:
- Aromug = Aroma + Mug
- Roastpresso = Roast + Espresso
- Sugafe = Sugar + Cafe
- Bloffee = Black + Coffee
- Auspresso = Austin + Espresso
If you’re having trouble coming up with some words, use a service like Wordoid to generate some starting points.
Compound words are much cooler (in my opinion) but harder to register:
- BlackMug
- HotSugar
- BlackMilk
- TexasBean
- TexasRoast
- BlackBean
Step 3: Use NameCheap’s beast mode to search
Namecheap has the best search engine for .COM domains (or any type of domain) and I love it for the following features:
- Up to 5,000 keywords to search
- Full TLD selection
- Price filtering
- Domain hacking
- Appending a prefix or suffix
In the search I entered all the keywords, the compound words, and the combined terms and searched for .COM domains only.
Step 4: Review your options
I quickly hit generate, and at time of writing (Sept 10, 2019) I received the following list of available .COM domains:
Great — so now I have my options, but if you’re unhappy with what you see, diver deeper into the tools above, come up with more keywords, more compound words, and more combined terms.
By following this simple exercise, I discovered that Aromug.com, Roastpresso.com, and Sugafe.com are all less than $10.
Now consider the domains of the top coffee companies in the world, and see how our names look next to the best:
- maxwellhouse.com
- dunkindonuts.com
- gmcr.com
- folgerscoffee.com
- starbucks.com
- aromug.com
- roastpresso.com
- sugafe.com
You must make a serious effort to qualify your choice here.
A name is important, but this guide is about discovering available options at low prices, not for guiding your company’s destiny.
My gut says that Sugafe sounds like sugar-free or sugary, and less about coffee. Great branding could eliminate that issue, but there is a confusion hurdle that must be addressed.
Aromug seems destined to be all about an environment with aromas and mugs, a community space, and if you plan to sell coffee from a small cafe popup without seating and paper cups, you can’t use it.
Roastpresso is the most intriguing, as it makes me think of the beginning and end of the coffee process, from roasting the beans to preparing espresso. It makes me think of drip coffee and fancier variations all at once, and it’s obviously referencing a key product: coffee.
If I were a coffee entrepreneur, I would buy roastpresso.com immediately. But I’m a branding specialist, and I hope a reader is inspired to go buy it.
Step 5: Begin the branding process and business plan
Only after you’ve secured a domain, which is truly the most important part of any business, should you move forward with branding and business development.
A good branding agency will provide all your materials from business card to business plan design (you’ll need to do most of the numbers work yourself) and bring the domain, name, and company to life.
But at the very least, by following these steps, you might have purchased and bookmarked a cheap .COM that you own for at least 1 year.
Happy hunting!
