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Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

deepsouthventures.com

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Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#131

Post by benibela »

asdff wrote: post #57

What is a great domain name? Decades ago it was essential to have an e in your name (eBay et al), then it was cute to replace that e with i, but the whole while the golden rule was to definitely whatever you do, do not use a name out of the dictionary, to make it easier for consumers to identify your product and to save you legal headaches. Nowadays, companies seem to love having a real dictionary name. Lemonade: ref…

And then there was a time with a my... prefix like myspace

Something24 was also popular

And of course ending with dot com

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#132

Post by benibela »

fxtentacle wrote: post #88

While everyone in here seems to disagree, I believe that a good domain name can be worth a lot of money, if it comes with links and traffic. For example, purchasing a domain to market my audio app which has 100+ inbound links and 500+ unique visitors per day from various blogs for relevant keywords. If you convert 10% at $9.99, that traffic is worth roughly $15k monthly to you. But it might have been worth significan…

What name? Is it like appname.com or audio.app or audio-app.com ? Perhaps it is best to purchase them all?

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#133

Post by eightturn »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #114
eightturn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks Alex (author here).. that domain article was one of my first, so I was (and still am) trying to find my writing voice. whatever that means.

Don't sweat it. A runaway hit like the onions piece is like catching lightning in a bottle. It's not really something you can plan and, so far, I haven't found a formula where you can reliably recreate it to any degree. (I've had two posts do about a tenth as well on HN as your onions piece, both on different blogs of mine and that didn't result in follow-up posts on those blogs being similarly successful. So my opin…

thanks.. just enjoy sharing this domain name world as I see so much opportunity there for small builders to compete with big corps.

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#134

Post by kristopolous »

flatt wrote: post #97
kristopolous wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about cheapening out, it's an exorbitant amount without much real customer value. "news.ycombinator.com" apparently works just as well as if this was "techtalk.com" or "bizchat.com" or whatever. Yahoo isn't about cowboys, Amazon isn't about rainforests, uber isn't a firm from Germany, Google isn't about mathematics... It really doesn't seem to be correlated with business success. Any made up name will do. Bl…

Does it though? There's little doubt in my mind that this site would have far greater reach (the actual desirability of that aside) if it were located at hackernews.com. I have no idea what the current owner would want for it but I'm sure it's substantial and rightfully so.

That's only because of naming cadence.

If they really cared they could come up with something. There's countless clones and proxy sites with closer and shorter names but they don't have large audiences because having a 4 (cuil) versus a 10 letter domain (duckdudckgo) doesn't actually matter - only what you put there.

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#135

Post by neil_s »

adenta wrote: post #123

We've gotten a lot of flack over our domain name, from everyone except our customers. https://terusama.com . Has anybody ever experimented with how company names relate to clicks in email campaigns?

Haha, it's a good point about customers not caring about that stuff.

Side note though, the stock video at the bottom of your homepage made me irrationally upset at how pointless it was.

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#136

Post by hobofan »

dangwu wrote: post #118
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laughed out loud at this example, because I run a site with (what I reckon to be) one of the best domain names for exactly that use-case: https://cycle.travel

Do you think having an unusual TLD (travel) is hurting you at all? If someone told an average person to go to "Cycle.travel", I'm not sure that they would understand that to be a web address.

From my experience, such an effect is generally far to small to be a deciding factor (in the beginning).

If you look at the traffic of most websites, very few visitors come directly to your website by entering the domain into the address bar (because visitors are far too lazy to type out an address). The biggest chunk normally comes from other websites directly linking to you (this includes search engines and social media sites), or paid advertising (if you do that).

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#137

Post by overcast »

lwneal wrote: post #68

You don't need to bid up the price of existing .com domain names. Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet! All you need are two or three words that satisfy the following criteria: 1. The words, when spoken, should be easy to spell. 2. The words, when read, should be easy to pronounce in any English dialect. 3. The words, when concatenated, should not create any ambiguity (a la…

Your startup name is... chlamydosaurusladybird.com

pretty catchy.

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#138

Post by goatherders »

This is an excellent roadmap (or the start of one at least) to build a nice side business with very little effort. People with a tech orientation, like the audience here, are VERY far removed from how most people use technology. So austincitytours.com turns you off? Me too. But the VAST majority of people are not like you. They click on the .COM that has the name/descriptor of what they want.

No, it isn't like it was 10 years ago where people would type the thing in and add ".com" BUt it's not that far off either. A LOT of traffic will gravitate to the trustworthy sounding .com

Additionally, as a guy in the lead gen business I can tell you that every business out there wants more demand. Finding partners to offer fulfillment takes almost no time at all.

The hardest part, perhaps the ONLY hard part of this whole model is getting traffic in the first place. As for me I don't spend any time at all on dropshipping or service fulfillment but rather on simply selling the leads. Leads are worth a LOT more money than many people realize.

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#139

Post by klondike_klive »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #86
lwneal wrote: post #68

You don't need to bid up the price of existing .com domain names. Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet! All you need are two or three words that satisfy the following criteria: 1. The words, when spoken, should be easy to spell. 2. The words, when read, should be easy to pronounce in any English dialect. 3. The words, when concatenated, should not create any ambiguity (a la…

> https://startupname.website The best one I got was roofpotato.com Sell rooftop potato garden kits? I guess that's my life now...

Funnily enough I am growing rooftop potatoes right now, so I'm in the market.

Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

#140

Post by klondike_klive »

tylerchilds wrote: post #117
nelaboras wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just got "girlfriendtape.com", can't decide between revenge porn and amateur porn.

I don't even know where to start with "mightbrabancon.com"

Ditto - I got forcesuck.com
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