10 Ways To Ruin Your Online Business with an Inferior Domain Name	1.4/5.0 (5 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Steve Baba July 12, 2004

Since every website needs a name, Dr. Steve Baba has written a free ebook that explains how to select domain names, which is free at www.seemly.com. Below are the top ten most common mistakes.

1. Buy a .net instead of a .com, and send 10% of your repeat customers to your competitor who owns the .com.

2. Use a number in your domain name, such as 1Widgets.com, but not own the spelled OneWidgets.com.

3. Since you are a great company, expect customers to remember a long domain name such as WorldsGreatestComputerCompany.com. This is also using a tag line as a name.

4. Give customers two opportunities to forget your name. Expect your customers to remember your company name, "World's Greatest Computer Company," and also expect customers to remember that your website is your initials WGCC.com.

5. Admire a famous company or a clever name, such as eBay, by using a slightly different name. Spend your startup capital and time on a trademark legal battle.

6. Make up a new word, such as Viagra, but don't spend millions on marketing to make the new word a household word, and expect your customers to remember the new coined word anyway.

7. Assume a name that worked for your brick-and-mortar store will also work just as well for your online store, when most customers remembered your brick-and-mortar store by your location, (the bike store at the shopping center).

8. Make customers think if your website is Widget.com (singular) or Widgets.com (plural) and send those who guess wrong to your competition.

9. Choose a name with dashes, such as Great-Widgets.com, and expect customers to remember that you have the dashes, while your competition, GreatWidgets.com, does not.

10. Choose a popular word such as "American" in AmericanWidgets.com and wait for one or more of the 10,000 other companies named American to sue you for trademark infringement.

The recently updated ebook on domain names is available at www.seemly.com for free.
No registration is required.
The ebook is a PDF file of approximately 250K.
The free ebook is advertising supported.

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