• short
• pronounceable
• spelled as it is sounded*** – If you have a domain name spelled differently than it sounds, you are going to get phone calls and emails from people who went to the wrong site and mistakenly thought it was yours. Also, people have an easier time remembering words they can phonetically say, spell, or sound out. Try it on yourself. Compare yourself with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, MoviePals.
• unique for what the website does – This is easiest to explain with an example: Imagine all 5 websites that sell movie tickets; which one stands out to you? MovieTickets, TheaterTickets, BuyFilmTickets, ShowTickets, Fandango. Fandango, out of that list is much easier to remember for it is unique in that group. Now if there were a bunch of names like Fandango, the more specific general domain name could be better in that case. Now take a look at this list: Fandango, Zimbando, Dingwoble, CantoMin, MovieTickets.  So where to the real lists come from?  What other domain names or competing domain names will be displayed in the same list as your website?  We’ll get more into this in the  Internet marketing section of this guide. For now, the list is going to be of competing websites that are in the same industry, going after your same target market.
• You can get all the major TLDs that are also available – This is so that no one can copy you, or steal your traffic by copying the domain name.

Interesting fact: we reserved socialmediasystems.com and .org for $8.95 each in early 2006!

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