Mr. Gary Lee

I met some prospective clients this past weekend and to my surprise a lot of them have an idea for an online business and have been thinking about putting together a site, but just haven’t gotten around to even picking their domain name. The would ask me if they should use hyphens or uncommon extensions (i.e. .tv, .net, .org, .us). I basically sat them down and let them know the general guidelines when picking up their domain name.

Don’t Make it Complicated - Just two things to remember!

• Short, Sweet and Unique is what I always say. When you have a conversation with someone and you want to tell them about your new website, you want it to make it as easy to remember as you can. If you plan to promote your website through word of mouth, you want the person to be able to easily communicate it to their friends. Don’t forget that b’s sound like p’s, also m’s and n’s & d’s and t’s, so don’t have too many of those to make it easy for your promoters to spell your domain outloud.
• Easy on the Eyes - What I mean is that you want your domain name to stand out on business cards, newspaper ads, tv ads and online ads, so avoid using a lot of double “m’s”, “t’s” and “p’s“, also avoid “l’s” cuz they look like “1’s!” An excess of these letters can confuse someone who’s spelling is not their greatest strength. Also, you only have a few seconds of their time when they see your ad, so make it count. One Tip to get people to remember your domain name when they see it is to capitalize the letters in the domain to make easy for people to see what the write words are - i.e. MrGaryLee.com. Courtesy of Bonnie at Best-Earning-Strategies.com who was having some fun with domain names, here are some examples of what happens when you don’t capitalize:
  • whorepresents.com (would’ve become who-represents.com)
  • expertsexchange.com (would’ve become experts-exchange.com)
  • penisisland.com (would’ve become pen-island.com)
  • therapistfinder.com (would’ve become therapist-finder.com)
  • viagrafix.com (would’ve become via-grafix.com)
  • Ihavegas.com (would’ve become iha-vegas.com)

At the end of the day, I still say that the quality of your site always outweighs the quality of your domain name, so if you can’t come up with the homerun name you want, it’s not the end of the world. Just find an effective domain that follow these rules and you should be fine.

The best tip I could give when asked about domain names is to

1. Write down your top ten domain name ideas.
2. Get in touch with your family, friends or online communities (such as the comments section at MrGaryLee.com) for your testing sample.
3. To test the Word of Mouth Scale - Say each domain outloud and ask your friend to repeat the ones they remember. Keep a running count of which domain gets remembered first, second and third by creating 3 columns on the right of your list to record your results.
4. To test the First Impression Stickiness - Create a 10 flash cards with your domain name options written on each card. Show them to your friend one at a time for about 1-2 seconds each. Then tell them about MrGaryLee.com to give them time to let all the names soak in their minds. When you’re done, ask them to tell you the first three domain names that come into their mind. Record the results on the back of the flash cards.

After you’ve talked to 10-20 people, you will begin to see a clear cut winner. If you don’t, then keep on running your tests! Good Luck and if you just don’t feel creative, you could always put your own Name in Your Domain and join in on the fun over a hundred Bloggers have enjoying these past few months.

Marketing