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24

Here's a down and dirty technique to figure out if your URL is good: Start talking to someone about your idea In the first minute of the conversation, tell them your URL Have a nice, long conversation with the person At the end of the conversation, ask them if they remember the name of your company/what URL your site is located at If they don't remember ...


17

http://www.nic.io/ The .io domain is allocated for the British Indian Ocean area: http://www.nic.io/rules.html. Some start-ups seem to like using these types of top-level domains to build cutsey domain-hacks; http://pistacch.io, http://moustach.io/, http://twit.io/, etc. From Wikipedia: .io is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for ...


16

What would your grounds for challenging be? They currently have a related product on the market with the same name as the one you plan to use in the future. Owning a domain name doesn't usually grant you any real protection or status. More importantly, and I say this as an attorney, why would you want to spend your startup money on litigation? If you haven't ...


13

Getting your domain name in front of buyers is obviously critical. Two main approaches: 1. Someone else sells it for you Afternic.com and Sedo.com are the two biggest "domain listing" sites. These are great places to get your name in front of many domain investors. For very good domains, Afternic has sales people that will help find buyers. If it's a ...


13

The top level domain administrator could go down during a riot or insurrection. Unlikely, but possible... If this happens, your site would be unreachable. The government of Somalia could take your domain away from you for no reason. The government of Somalia could raise the price for registering your domain to an exorbitant amount. Any disputes would need ...


13

No other domain extension is going to "take over" the place that .com extensions have in the public's mind in the next 10 years. (Probably ever) How do I know this- take a look at toll free 800 numbers in the US. The US ran out of toll free 800 numbers years ago. They added a number of other prefixes that are toll free. So what does American Idol have to ...


11

and welcome to this site! :-) Here is an article on domain name acquisition that I found really, really useful. It should answer all your questions. Be sure to read the comments as well. The one weak area of the article is IMHO the contract. If you buy from a large domain seller they may have a purchase process in place, with a standard contract or method ...


11

What is the purpose of the web site and who is the target audience? If you are trying to sell something, or just deal with the general public .COM is the only choice. How many times have you mistyped someone's email address because it ended in .net or .org? You mistype the email address because you have been trained, since the day you first went on the ...


11

You could and should purchase your domain name as soon as possible. Anyone can own a domain name, you dont have to be a corporation. You simply register the domain name using a registration service such as Godaddy.com or Register.com. Pay for the domain name using your own credit card, since you dont yet have a corporate bank account. When you get to ...


11

I took a look at your web site. You have chosen an unbelievably competitive market, where your competition can afford to run TV ads during the Super Bowl. Your chance of success is vanishingly small. So ask yourself, how much in sales did you make in the last quarter? And how much in the quarter before that? Is the sales number at least doubling every ...


10

Your impression that the domain extension (as long as it is .com, .net, or .org) doesn't matter is simply incorrect. People are not born with a knowledge of how to use the internet. They learn how to use the internet. Every search, every url they see, every experience they have on the internet is training them in the proper way to use the internet. So in ...


9

Here's a pretty good breakdown of the length of domain names and the success companies have had with them. How to Name Your Startup and Land the Perfect Domain Essentially, it recommends short (8 letters or less), easy to spell, easy to remember names. And definitely use a .com. Going along those lines, adding "the" to the domain name uses unnecessary ...


9

If you speak the domain name, can someone type it in? If not, you might have a problem. If I say go to "Tommy24x7.com" what will people do? tommy24x7.com tommy24/7.com tommy247.com tommy24-7.com tommy24by7.com Only one of those is correct. This willbe a problem if you ever expect people to respond to spoken advertising or word of mouth.


9

I had the same issue with a domain held by a company that bought and parked domains in the USA. I approached them (and dealt with a woman) she said they wanted $1800 for the domain and said others were interested (yeah right). I walked away. I had the .co.uk and .net versions anyway (but really wanted the .com). Two years later I knocked back on the door ...


8

I agree that the quickest, most cost-effective approach is likely to be invoking the UDRP. For a summary of what the complainant must prove, please see "How to Defeat a Cybersquatter". Disclaimer: This post does not constitute legal advice and does not establish an attorney-client relationship.


8

Two letter domain names are rare, and (relative to domain prices) very expensive. All of them. The length of the domain name is one of the top criteria for the price of a domain. Two letter domain names in dot com are referred to as LL.com (for Letter Letter), and I doubt you will find any LL.com for under $50,000. You can check Sedo.com listing and the ...


8

Great question! I hope this get up-voted as many times as possible. If money is not an object, you are well funded, or have more money than god then finding a domain name is not a problem. The truth is while domain investors have registered: the english dictionary, the english dictionary with combination of words, all short words, and almost every domain ...


8

PickyDomains.com is a crowd-sourced domain name suggestion service. $50 for a bunch of suggestions, you only pay if you decide to use one. LeanDomainSearch.com is the successor to Domain Pigeon. You enter a keyword, it pairs it with 1000 other keywords and tells you which .coms are available. Dotomator.com is a nice word beginning / ending combinator. ...


8

I have a customer who had the same problem: he got a great name and bought the domain of his country. Then he tried to get the .com domain via a reseller. Somehow the reseller did fail: he did not have the right to offer us the domain. So this deal didn't happen. But the owner of the domain did knew about our interest and suddenly the price was insane ...


7

Do you want to emphasize your app's name or your company's name? What about *name*app.com? What shows up in Google results when you search for name? With enough press and reviews, can you overcome whatever the results are to be at the top? Historically, trademark applications have run me about $1,000 with legal time and fees and taken about 15-18 months ...


7

I am adding this as an answer as I don't yet have 15 rep to post a comment, but this is no more than an extension of Martin's answer. Stay away from shortcutting numbers in domain / company names. Seriously. As far away as you can. I have recently started looking into the process of getting a resident's visa to the UK. As it turns out, the UK government does ...


7

Since you own both domains, use the one without dash as the primary domain. It is the most conventional choice, the choice most people are accustomed to. I think the number of users who actually enter URLs into the address bar is limited, but those who do will probably enter the non-dash version first. Ideally you should do the following: Have a meta ...


7

Be sure this is not part of a scam. I've gotten this email a few times (for domains that obviously aren't worth that much). How it works is they ask you to get the domain appraised, steering you into some bogus appraisal company they run. That usually runs about $100 bucks or so, and they'll run off with your money and never hear from them again. Here's ...


7

He is offering the domain to you for $1,000 and you have offered him $300, and thus we know the current value of the domain is somewhere between $1,000 and $300. So you have several options: You can negotiate with him to see if you can find a price that is agreeable to both of you. In the US, watch a number of episodes of Pawn Stars to get a feel for price ...


6

Registering the .com is the best choice. If the non-hyphenated .com isn't available, I suggest you either try to come up with a different name, or add app to the end of the domain name you want. For example, mydomainapp.com. If it were me, I would try to come up with another domain that is available under the .com, instead of adding app to one that is ...


6

You should have both domains. Next, you must switch to serving your site on dropbox.com and create 301 redirection from getdropbox.com to dropbox.com Before you add this 301 redirection, check that everything works great on new domain, maybe site have static references to old domain.


6

Would depend on the perspective user/customer base. Does it contain people who would likely be offended, or consider such antics childish? If yes, then it would be advisable not to do it. If you were marketing to me, I wouldn't care much about cuss words in the companies name, or somewhere on your website and other literature. But my dad would. You'd ...


5

Look at it backwards: Which brand do you want to build/strengthen? Is your goal to say "I'm good at what I do, and here are the things I am working on," or is your goal to say "This is X, a new company. Here are our experiences building it." I think if you decide this first, then the choice of how to blog will be easier. If you want to do both, then ...


5

and welcome to this site. :-) You should not use http://company.wordpress.com or http://company.blogger.com -- it looks unprofessional. If it's possible, then the classic advice is to keep as much content as possible on just one domain name, i.e. www.company.com/blog/ .(company.com is one domain name, www.company.com is another, and blog.company.com would ...


5

Do the search engines treat .co and .com differently? No, they do not. Should I go for 1st choice name .co or less preferred name .com? If your target audience is local, then having the best possible domain name in a local top-level domain is generally better than having a weak domain name in a global top-level domain. If your target audience is ...



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