A mistake you see all the time is a startup picking a name that means nothing, simply because the name was cheap or available.
Some argue that look at Twilio, Amazon, Google, McDonald’s and others. Their name doesn’t tell you what they do, and they are successful, so why not pick a random word or words for a domain?
Well, If you have a big budget to throw at branding a name, sure, pick anything and go throw 30+ million dollars worth of branding and promotion on it and hope it sticks. Everything sounds like a great name if you hear it long enough.
Alternately, you could go with a meaningful domain and reap incredible benefits.
Consider CreditCards.com, they paid almost $3 million dollars for that domain. Should they just have picked a random word instead or Credit-Cards? or CreditCards.RandomExtension? They did end up building a business around the site as part of other offerings and sold for $143 million. Could they have done it with any domain? The buyers of the domain originally was a marketing firm (ClickSuccess), they know the real value of investing in a good asset vs the costs with trying to get the consumer to a random word.
The chances of making it as a new business (online or offline) are very low, so why do so many people choose the lower their chances further by not coming to terms with the reality that a good domain will cost money but also potentially save them in branding and marketing.
The first thing you should do is write a wish list of the best names you would like for your business / project. A good broker can think of creative ways to possibly get you one of those within a price arrangement that can work for you.
As nice as your made up name sounds to you and the people you talk to, once you go with it the reality will hit very quickly and sometimes it is a very sad and costly reality.
This is not to say you must have a perfect match domain keyword. However, make sure you consult properly because just asking people you know (even those “straight shooters”) can end up being a financial disaster.
Let’s say you want to start a company that helps people get loans fast. Obviously lending.com loans.com are not an option. FastLoans.com is already taken or priced too high for you, what could you do? You could make up a random word that means nothing or you could get creative and use alternate words that the consumer already associates with fast, for example, “dash”, “rapid” etc. So Loan Dash or Rapid Loans would be good choices, they are brandable names and tells the consumer what it is you do.
Do people type in to Google loan dash or rapid loans right now if they are looking for a loan? Highly unlikely, however, the price for such a name is a fraction of the cost of an exact match loan domain and certainly beats out a random word domain.
To review a small list of premium domains that sold and their final price click here.