Matthew T. Struck - Systems Specialist
 
     
 
 
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With nearly 100,000 domains being registered on a daily basis, nearly everyone has their own domain name. So many people in fact that it is getting increasingly difficult to create a successful domain name brand. This is mainly due to the fact that all of the single-word based domain names are taken (for example www.word.com registered by Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Businesses are now having to get more creative when selecting domain names and having to purchase several variations to ensure their customers find their site every time.

Unless you want to spend a lot of money to purchase an already taken domain, many businesses today are simply registering their slogan or products. Since www.realtor.com is taken, a business might check the availability of www.sellingyourhouse.com.  Other businesses are making up their own words or using acronyms to get that specific domain name brand. Tricks like these help keep the domain name short and easy to type however, finding and remembering these domains are sometime more difficult.

To help with the more difficult to remember domains, business can register other domains that actually teach your customers how to spell your unique domain. If for example your domain was www.suxess.com, a business might register and market www.successwithx.com. Users are more likely to remember the unique domain successwithx instead of just suxess. The site for successwithx then could re-route customers to the real site and explain the difference thereby educating customers the next time they come back.

Another trick to help with hard to remember domains is with misspellings. Even the most common words like “the” are misspelled when they are typed using a keyboard. Registering your domain’s most common grammatical misspellings and keyboard misspellings is a good place to start. Keyboard misspellings are words that have letters rearranged because users typed them into the keyboard. So for example, the word “computer” can actually be misspelled “comupter” or “comptuer" Grammatical misspellings are those that users would misspell using a keyboard or not.

It’s also a good idea to register the other domain extensions for any domains your register even if your business purchased the .COM. This way, none of your competitors will purchase these other extensions and re-route your customers over to them. Protect your investment and register at least the .NET and .ORG.

One other element to try and identify is with multiple word domain names. Remember that domain names cannot have any spaces so domains that have words that start and end with the same letter can be confusing to type. For example, “onlineeducation” is a two word domain with the letter “e” in common. With these domains, it usually is a good idea to also register the variations without the repeating character. So for the example “onlineeducation” a business might also register the domain “onlineducation” or even “online-education” with a hyphen separating the words. These extra domains might make the difference between you and your competitors.

Domain registration will only continue to become more difficult as we run out of words in the English language to register. Crytech now offers online domain registration to help take some of the guesswork out of selecting your company's domain. Visit crytech's online domain registration and see if your domain is available. Crytech also offers hosting if you already have a domain or can even manage your domain if you chose to transfer it to crytech.
 

 
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