You might already have a domain name but it’s worth spending a minute reviewing it.  Obviously, with millions of websites already out there, most of the short catchy domain names are long gone but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of good ones left.  A lot of the domain registration services will bring up similar domains when you search for one that turns out to be unavailable.  In other words, if you search for money.com as an example, it’s obviously taken but they’ll suggest other similar domains that are still available.

I use 1WebsiteSolution.com for all my domain registrations and I always search first for a domain I know is already taken.  I’ll put in just a single keyword – a word like “money” – knowing it’ll be unavailable.  But doing so will display other related domain names that might work for my purposes.  As of this writing, it offered options including hipmoney.com, robustmoney.com, thingsmoney.com and newmoneyinc.com.  I think all of those are pretty effective domains, depending on your business.

Let’s look at another example.  When I entered “marketing”, it came back with options including marketinggun.com, pigmarketing.com and get this: halmarketing.com – which I think is pretty clever.  I’ve had a lot of success with my own domains including Box 14, Beyond the Rate, Tactical Execution, Fluid Occasions, Financial Audio, Deliberate Curiosity, Target Echo, My Card Helper and, of course, Patrick Schwerdtfeger so there are definitely plenty of good domains out there.  You just need to do a bit or research.

Spend a little time and register a good domain name and it’s worth noting, by the way, that search engines do give preference to websites that include keywords in the domain name.  If you’re doing a Google search for the word “marketing” and someone has a website with that word in the URL, it will get some preference in the search results.  And the word doesn’t have to be separated by dashes or anything either.  Google will simply notice that the sequence of letters in the word “marketing” is the same as the sequence of letters in the URL. If at all possible, include your primary keyword in your domain name.

It’s also worth noting that very few people actually type your URL into the address bar.  If they find it in a search engine, they just click on the link.  If they find it on some other referring website, again, they just click on the link.  That means you could have a long clumsy URL and it wouldn’t actually matter that much.  As an example, you might select something like profitable-marketing-strategy.com and get a bunch of free traffic from search engines because people are searching for that phrase and your site would probably come up pretty high.  As of this writing, that domain is available, as are thousands of other similar options.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could simply add a letter and/or number to your primary keyword and find tons of short catchy domains as well.  I recently launched an integrated search platform and registered G7search.com.  Short.  Simple.  As of this writing, R7marketing.com, Z3investing.com and B5insurance.com are all available.  You get the idea.

Lastly, I suggest you register your domain names for five years at a time.  There isn’t usually any significant price advantage, if any, but one or two years goes by quickly and I almost lost a domain once because it expired on me before I could renew it. On 1WebsiteSolution, the cost for five years is about $40 ($8 per year) and the prices are dropping all the time.