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A Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Successful Community Forum (Part IV)
by Fernando Hal (cheatad.com)

After you define the niche for your forum website, you can then proceed to get a domain name. Here is some basic information about choosing domain names as well as some tips in choosing great domain names.

What is a domain name?
According to Wikipedia: A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS).
In simple term, a domain name is the address that you type in to reach a website, usually (though not necessarily) prefixed by a “www.” and ended with a “.com”. For example cheatad.com is a domain name, google.co.uk is a domain name.

Generic TLD or country-specific TLD
TLD stands for Top Level Domain, referring to right part after the last dot of the domain name. In the example above, google.co.uk is using a country specific TLD (.uk), while cheatad.com is using a generic TLD(.com). You use country specific TLD when you are certain that the target audience of this website is in United Kingdom. As of June 2009, there are 20 generic TLD and 248 country specific TLD. The most commonly used generic TLD are .com (Commercial) , .net (Network ), .org (Organization), .edu (Education) and .gov (Government) while popular country-specific TLD are .uk (United Kingdom) , .ca (Canada), .de (Germany), .jp (Japan), and .fr (France).

Domain aftermarket prices
Domain names, especially valuable domain names, are traded in the aftermarket and can fetch many thousand times more than the original registration price. Here are some of the most notably expensive domain name ever transacted and the price tag.

Sex.com $12.5 million
Fund.com $9.99 million
Porn.com $9.5 million
Business.com $7.5 million
Diamonds.com $7.5 million
Toys.com $5.1 million
Vodka.com $3 million
Wine.com $3 million
CreditCards.com $2.75 million
Computers.com $2.1 million
Seniors.com $1.8 million
DataRecovery.com $1.66 million
Cameras.com $1.5 million
Tandberg.com $1.5 million

If you notice on the list above all domain names are generic words except for Tandberg.com where the domain name was sold by a public listed company Tandberg Data to another public listed company Tandberg.

Where to buy domain name?
Godaddy.com is the most popular domain name registrar. There are registrar offering lower prices, but godaddy is your best bet for saving yourself from big headache in the future.

5 Questions to ask yourself when choosing domain name

1. Generic TLD or country specific TLD?
   Use country specific TLD only if you are sure large majority (90% and above) of your target market is located in, originated from, or departing to the country. If unsure, get the generic TLD. Safer still, get both generic TLD and the country TLD.
2. .com, .net or .org?
   .com (as well as the country specific version of the .com, for example .co.uk, .com.au, or .co.jp) should generally be your first choice compared with other domain name extension. However, there are some circumstances where it is better to get other extensions. For example, if you are running educational institution website, .edu will be better choice as it signals trustworthiness.
3. What are key criteria for good domain names?
   Short, easy to type, easy to say out, easy to remember. That’s the ideal domain name. If there is one to sacrifice among those four, I would choose “short”. If possible, get a domain name shorter than 6 characters. But if you can’t despair not. As long as it is 10 characters or less, it is still alright. Needless to say, a domain name too long will be harder to type, remember or say.

   Avoid hyphen sign (-) or numbers by all means. When started, I made a mistake that I regretted till now. Imagine having to tell your domain name 1-domain-name.com to a prospective clients, you will have to read “It’s one domain name dot com, as in, one, the number, then hyphen sign, domain, hyphen sign, name, dot com. You got it?”

4. Generic word domain or brandable domain?
   While you can see above that almost all of the eye-popping figures for domain name sales are for generic word domain names, the most successful websites pay attention to their branding, regardless of whether they are using generic word (FaceBook, YouTube, MySpace, Live) or purely brand (Google, Yahoo, Ebay).

   Essentially, if you can get the generic-word, short domain name, by all way do it. But don’t spend a fortune on it; the money is better spend on developing a good site and brand campaign. And don’t get the very-long-domain-name-in-the-name-of-seo.com just for the sake of generic keyword. To be frank, having the keyword in your domain name helps in SEO (search engine optimization), but not so much to justify hard-to-remember names.

5. Do I need to include the word forum in the domain name?
   No, it is really not necessary. Unless that’s the nearest you can get to your first choice. For example, if you can get car.com (that’s a big, fat hope, by the way), there is no reason you would get carforum.com instead.

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