Last year only, ICAN introduced over a 1000 new gTLDs to enable companies and individuals to register the name that best reflects the idea behind their brands. With the growth of digital strategies, a domain name has become one of the most powerful branding elements and has grown in value for different kinds of businesses.
Despite the new introductions, however, choosing the right domain name still seems like a huge problem for most startups and SMBs. A great portion of them still tends to choose a domain name inadequate to their business purposes because their desired premium .com domain is sold out or too expensive. Given its value, of course, the choice of a domain name should never be a decision made ad-hoc.
This is why businesses need to understand all the possible options that can get them a great online ID at a reasonable price. Namely, getting a premium domain doesn’t have to be either complex or expensive.
Most important factors in choosing a great domain name
A powerful domain name is the one that properly reflects your business idea and that your audience finds easy to remember. To achieve this, you need to get several critical factors right.
- Make it short, catchy and memorable. Like your brand name, you want your domain to be something that the audience can instantly relate to. Therefore, you want to choose a short and catchy phrase that can help you build your brand more easily.
- Take an aesthetic approach. Always take into consideration how your name will show up in search and how your logo will correspond with it.
- Keep it evocative. Let visitors know what is it that you do the moment they spot your domain name.
- Make it target market friendly. Using slang, misspellings or certain abbreviations in your domain name might be suitable if you’re targeting teenagers, but you may want to avoid this if you’re dealing with business professionals.
Why premium domain names are so sexy
Looking at the features outlined above, it is clear that the golden rule for choosing a great domain name is to find something short and catchy. Bear in mind that this doesn’t really mean that you should use abbreviations, alternative spellings and different other strategies in order to adjust your company name to the available domain. If you thought that this might be a safe strategy, take a look at this article to understand why it is not necessarily so.
As a general recommendation, domain names with up to nine characters work best both in search and for branding, which is exactly why premium domains are important. Namely, premium domains typically consist of short five-letter words that are excellent for building a huge brand. Again, premium .com domains may cost millions of dollars, but there are lots of awesome domain names still out there and you just need to find them.
Prior to the launch of our new SEO tools, we decided to go with .ME because they have an excellent offer for registering premium domains. We chose base.me and dibz.me because we believed that they would be easier to build a brand and community around.
The steps to getting a premium domain
Now that the value of a premium domain is more or less clear, you should consider taking the following steps to get it.
In case of .me, premium domains do not have a designated price and you can submit a proposal on the amount you’re willing to pay to get a desired name. Namely, .ME has a special program for premium domains intended to match great domains with great content. To get one, you need to have a great business idea and sign a contract that obliges you not to change the website’s purpose in the next three years. More specifically, the steps to getting a premium .ME domain are as follows.
Step 1: Understanding allocation criteria. The non-auction allocation of a premium domain requires applicants to fulfill five criteria in order to be eligible for getting the domain
Step 2: Submitting an application. If you have a great idea and are eligible for the allocation, you need to fill in the associated application form for a review. The team will decide on whether the domain name is suitable for your business based on your idea, business development plan and quality of service to be provided.
Step 3: Signing in the Allocation Agreement. This form is used to transfer the ownership of a domain name to the registrar once the previous steps are completed.
Instead of trying to find a way to adjust your business idea to a cheap domain name, you might consider getting a premium domain the alternative way. Having a bulletproof domain can save you time and investments through a catchy phrase or a name that people can relate to and this is why you should take premium domains into account when planning your branding strategy.
Of course, as soon as your target audience starts clicking on your website in the search you’ll know that you’ve made a great choice.
I’m loving .me to be honest. It helps you deliver a message instantly and you can combine it with all sorts of approaches, whether you’re building a personal or business brand. In short, .Me can give you the much needed SEO value, while at the same time letting you grow your brand internationally.