In the world of social media your name is everything. It can be your domain name, Twitter name, your login on Facebook, and your link on LinkedIn. If you have an uncommon name like Gary Vanerchuk or Phil Gerbyshak, you can pretty much be assured that you will have an easy time of securing a domain name and login names in all of the social media accounts.
But what if you have a common name like mine. There are thousands of John Richardson’s around the world and all facets of that name have been used multiple times. As a blogger for five years, I have quite a bit of traffic to my site, yet I fall on page three or four on Google when searching for my name. I tell people all the time to search for “goal setting” instead of my name to find me.
In any type of web presence, an easy to remember domain name is a must. It should be as short as possible and contain keywords that match your business or niche. It should be a dot.com if at all possible. Having your name available is a huge plus. But what if your name or keywords aren’t available in a dot.com name?
You do have some options…
1. You can purchase a dot.org or dot.net or if you do video a dot.tv. The problem with these names is Google tends to rate them lower than dot.coms and most people will not remember the other extension.
2. You can buy a domain with three or more keywords. For example, if we wanted a unique name in the social media niche we might come up with socialmediaadventure.com or socialmediagrandadventure.com to use on our sites. The problem with these names is they are long and somewhat hard to remember. The longer a name, the more apt they are to be misspelled. The other problem is they do not lend themselves well to a login name.
3. You can use fewer words and use dashes to separate them. You might find social-media-adventure.com is available when the no dash version is not. The problem with these is that people can’t figure out what character is a dash and you may have a conflict with another web site.
4. You can make up your own custom name and use this as your domain name. Names like Google, Viddler, Flickr, are some popular variants of this idea. While you can get a rather short name this way, you will probably have to tell people how to spell it and most will not contain a keyword. The good news is, you will not need a URL shortener for Twitter.
Here is where a dictionary comes in…
Lets take a look at some popular keywords and their pronunciations in a popular online dictionary. These sound out words are all currently available at GoDaddy.
social = soh-shul
media = mee-dee-uh
adventure = ad-ven-char
millionaire = mil-yuh-nair
social media adventure = social-media-adventure
********************************************
For our 12 Week Adventure we went with MEEDEEAH.COM
Meedeeah will make a great login name and is only eight characters long. It is a sound out word and is instantly recognizable as replacement for media.
Over the next few weeks we will setup a blog and other social media using our new domain name.
Question: What alternative domain name would you choose for your niche?