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One of the first things to do when venturing on a new site project is also the most important, yet also the thing most people neglect to devote enough effort into. The domain name you select for your site will have a huge impact upon it’s success or failure.

I had a friend recently ask for some advice about setting up a dating site. He’d done a few other sites in the past so he wasn’t new to all of this, but the semi-adult side of the business he wasn’t as familiar with as I am. I told him I was eager to help him and I encouraged him to ask me questions as he got them as I could probably save him a lot of problems–I’d already made all the mistakes and knew what to avoid.

A few days passes without hearing anything from him so I inquire how things are going. He says great, that he’s already selected a domain name and started work on the site. I was surprised and a bit scared to ask what name he’d selected. He says that he selected the name “Sexy____Dating”. I immediately knew what problem lay ahead for him and I asked him why he hadn’t asked me my opinion about the domain name “before” he registered it? He said he wanted to try to do as much he could on his own and was confident he’d selected a good name. I wasn’t so confident and I informed him what problem lay ahead for him.

Dating sites are generally fairly mainstream. As such, it’s very easy to get advertising, but he shot him self in the foot with that name as he turned his benefit of having a mainstream site into a negative with his selection of a name. What I was aware of was that his selection of the word “Sexy” would be flagged for the “Sex” part and he’d have difficulty getting some advertising. He tried to explain to me that the word was “Sexy” and not “Sex” and I let him explain that to me as long as he wanted as it’d do more good telling me than telling an automated software program at Google that’d be flagging his site or later trying to get an over worked customer service guy who really doesn’t care to over-ride the software’s flag. Sure enough, he later goes to setup a Google Adwords account and gets denied for the word “Sex” appearing in his domain.

It’s simple things like this which might not seem obvious at first, but which are learned through years of registering and working with domain names. I’ve had my problems with names, learned from them, but sometimes you must weigh the positives and negatives as sometimes it might be worth getting a name which you know will have some problems. One of my current web-sites is BeautifulLadyboys.com. “Ladyboy” is a term used to describe an Asian shemale so it was most appropriate for use in my domain name. Yet, I knew I’d probably have issues with Google and sure enough they denied me the right to use the actual domain name when advertising with them because of the word “Boy”. I tried in several emails to explain that “ladyboy” is one word and a term yet I assume their software flags were continually flagging the term as involving minors because of the word “boy” and their human staff were too overworked to care as it was probably easier for them to just send me a form response than devote two seconds to actually think.

However, even with that and other problems, I’m very glad I selected that name as I believe it’s a great name and I get a lot of traffic as people that would join the site are the same people typing “beautiful ladyboys” into a search engine.

Making sure that you have key words in your domain name is important as you can see. In my above example my customers would be those interested in Beautiful Ladyboys, but I soon realized that there are two distinct groups of people interested in ladyboy–those interested in pre-op ladyboy and those interested in post-op.  These groups would get upset if I didn’t provide them with enough updates of their interest and since people generally assume a ladyboy site will have pre-ops at least unless otherwise stated, I decided to create a new site BeautifulPostOpLadyboys.com and moved all my post-op content over to that.  What’s that site about?  It’s very obvious with the name and I haven’t received another complaint about not enough pre-op or post-op content as if you want pre-op then go to BeautifulLadyboys.com and for post-op it’s BeautifulPostOpLadyboys.com

Your domain name can be up to 63 characters long (not including the .com ending), but it’s usually best to keep the domain name as short as reasonably possible, but long enough to incorporate your important key words and tell people what the site is about. Very short or one word key words have long been registered as have almost anything else decent so be prepared to learn that someone else long ago thought of your killer domain name, and if it “is” available you might want to wonder why? It’s a big world and chances are good someone else came up with your killer name long ago and if not then maybe it’s not such a great name after all.

Make a list of common key words someone might type in who would be interested in your content, and then try to work those into a domain name.

Make the name memorable. The name should roll off your tongue and you should be able to think of ways to easily and frequently incorporate the name into sentences at your site. “In this set beautiful ladyboys Nicky and Amy play together in the shower.”

I use NetworkSolutions to check domain names as back when I started registering domains that was the ONLY site you could register from. There are many now and almost all much less expensive, but I’m just familiar with NetworkSolutions so I still check domain availability there.

The prices at NetworkSolutions are a bit high in my opinion so once other companies started offering registration, I left and never went back. While I do believe it’s best to use just one company for all your domains so that there is just one centralized location you need to learn and check, you’ll find that I use a few different companies as over the years some of my domains have been transferred to different companies without my prior approval as companies have be bought out, and I’d have to wait until the expiration date came to move them unless I wanted to pay to transfer them immediately. When the expiration dates did come, the service at some of the companies was satisfactory enough that I just left them there which explains why I have domains spread across a few different registrars now.

One site I had a few domains transferred to just recently which I’m liking very much so far is Hover. They are very easy to use, have great customer service, and a nice privacy option to keep your personal information private which is available at no extra cost unlike most other companies. However, realize that wherever you decide to host your site, they will probably have domain registration as part of their services. Don’t pay much more than you have to though so make sure to check prices.

Stick to “.com”. It’s .com or .NOTHING. Once you’ve registered a few domains and have a better feel for things you might want to venture into the .OTHER categories, but for now just take my word and try to stick with .com. I tried my hand at a few .OTHER names long ago and quickly learned that it was generally better to have a bad .com name than a great .OTHER name. Many reasons for that, but the most obvious is that people generally won’t remember .OTHER so getting them to remember your correct domain name will be an issue. Also people seem to trust .coms more than most .OTHERs with the exception of a few like .gov or .edu which you won’t be using anyway.

Ok, let’s go over my procedure for selecting a new domain name. First thing I do is select some possible domain names based on keywords which best describe my content. Taking another look at the content and write down different keywords as you look through our pictures and video. It’s actually a good idea to really do this and not just go from your memory as you’ll find you’ll come up with many more and better keywords if you actually look at what you’ll be shooting and write down keywords as they come to you. Think about possible negatives related to certain keywords.

Put together some possible domain names. Check to see which of those domain names are currently available. Those which aren’t available, maybe you can make a variation which might be available.

You can use hyphens, numbers, and any alphabet character in a domain name.  Spaces are not allowed in a domain name and they can’t start or end with a hyphen.  Hyphens in a domain name can be used separate the words are an option which many like and even Google seems to like this as it clearly defines your words sexy-BLANK-dating not sex-yxyz-dating. However, I don’t like hyphens and of all my domain names I think I only have 1 which uses hyphens now. Why? Customers don’t remember hyphens! Enough said.

Make sure your name ends in “.com” and don’t get fooled into registering anything except a .com unless you have a bit of experience with domain names first. You have a much higher chance of success with a “.com”.

Do a spell check on the individual words in the domain name. Doesn’t matter how easy the words are, it’s not worth risking registering a misspelled name by mistake. Oh course you could just register another name once you realize your mistake, but best to get things right the first time as non of us has enough time in the day to be doing things twice.

Discuss your possible domain names with close friends/family. Make a list and have them vote on which ones they like and ask them to suggest possible other domain names. Do NOT tell anyone else other than close friends and family as you’ll likely discover the name registered quickly by someone else and made available for sale to you at a higher price. There are some assholes out there!

Speaking of assholes, I was at a bar overseas late one night talking to the bar owner about his new adult site he planned to start. He knew I ran adult sites as I’d shot some of the girls working at his bar and they were so impressed that they’d showed him the pictures. So he’d pick my brain for advice whenever I’d go to his bar. This time he hands me a new business card with the name of his new adult web-site he’s planning printed on the bottom. I immediately pulled out my iPhone to see what if any work he had done on the site and noticed it wasn’t live yet. I then checked to see if he’d even registered the domain name (as it was a good name indeed) and he hadn’t even done that YET. Well, I had a few drinks in me, never did like this guy as he was the biggest Australian American-hating asshole I’d met who’d give me shit about being an American every time I went into his bar, so I registered the domain sitting right there in his bar from my iPhone! Redirected his traffic to a similar site I already had. So keep your names to yourself and select others until AFTER you’ve registered it.

Narrow your list down to the top 5 give or take. Then ask people again.

Sleep on it! This is very important. You won’t want to let that perfect name get away I know, but if it’s available today, it’ll likely be available tomorrow unless you told the wrong people about your possible names. There have been many times when I KNEW I had the perfect name and was so anxious to register it before someone else grabbed it, only to sleep on it and wake up GLAD I didn’t register it as I realized serious issues with the name or else I thought of something much better. I find sleeping on a name to be very helpful.

Then register your name. The place where you host your site probably has registration services and if they aren’t asking outrageous prices for that you might want to just register with them as it’ll likely be easier since they’ll set it all up for you as well. Otherwise check out Hover as I was originally a bit upset when some of my domains got transferred to them without my aproval, but I’m very pleased with their service and consider them one of the best, most affordable, most robust, and easiest to use domain registrars out there.

If you don’t have a place yet you’d like to host at let me know as I’ll be talking about that in future posts. I plan to discuss free services (where you often get what you pay for) and paid services as well as introducing a revolutionary new plan we are working on a plan in which we’ll host your site, help you build it and maintain it at no upfront cost to you. Still working on the details of our plan so I’ll talk about that once we have it more ironed out. If you’d like to get in before it’s made publicly available just let us know. It’ll be aimed at people with little experience, but with content who are wanting a site and expert help without having to pay the expert help fees.

Also, once registered, beware of companies sending you emails and mail reminding you about renewing once it’s time for your renewal as it might be a scam. They might pretend that you are registered with them or your name was transferred to them, but ignore all of that. Make sure to remember where you registered at and just return there–that’s why it’s best to limit to one place as it’s easier to remember. And for those of you who don’t know, each year you’ll have to pay again to renew your domain name–XYZ.com. The price will be between $7 – $15 generally. That price you’ll have to pay each year. You will also have to pay for hosting (a place to house your site) as registering the domain is ONLY about the NAME of the site and nothing else. We’ll talk about hosting another day.