Picking a Domain that Sizzles and Sells
One of the most important parts of your site is the domain name that you choose. Domain names can make or break a site, and more importantly the traffic that is or is not going to it from search engines.One of the most important parts of your site is the domain name that you choose. Domain names can make or break a site, and more importantly the traffic that is or is not going to it from search engines. In this article I will express my opinions about what I think makes a good domain, and offer things to stay away from when choosing a domain name. As always, these thoughts are my opinion. I do not claim to have all the answers, just observations that I have collected in the six years of being in the business.
First let’s talk about the words to avoid. Though words may not be illegal, and a word such as “boy” when included with the word “college,” for instance, is not in any way suggesting you have underage models, be aware that some search engines, especially the big ones, will shy away from adult sites using them anyways. AVS companies and link list or TGP sites may also do so, and getting traffic to your killer designed site may be next to impossible. They don’t like the use of these words and so you are tempting fate to include words like that in your domain name. I think everyone has a pretty good idea of the words that ought to be excluded – words such as “rape,” “bestiality,” and “scat” are givens, but the fringe words can be just as bad for the success of your site even though you may not think it should be that way.
With that said, let’s get into what really makes a domain good. Let’s take a gay site, for example, that depicts well-built guys. Suppose you want to target both the gay market as well as the women’s market. It is important to choose a domain that will reflect the content on the site while not excluding one group that may want to view it. For example, women would most likely go look at a site that has “studs” in the domain name, such as dreamstuds.com (JB’s site for those that know her), but if you were to add “screwing,” making it dreamstudsscrewing.com, it’s most likely the “for women” audience just would opt out, as most women don’t like looking at guys having sex. Guys looking for guys will still respond nicely, if they are looking for muscular guys, so the domain is a good one. Another reason for it being a good one is because it is short. Typing dreamstuds.com is much easier than typing guysthatwelovetodreamabout.com. In addition to picking a domain name that’s easy to type, think about picking a name that’s easy for surfers to remember. If a surfer happens to stumble on your site and does not bookmark it, the shorter the name the better the odds are that it may be remembered for later reference.
The next thing to think about is availability. I have seen many people, including myself, who have had a great idea for a domain name, and when I went to check, the dot-com was taken and the dot-net or the hyphenated version was available. Take for example my hub domain gayfrat.net. My original wish was for the dot-com, but since it was taken I chose to register the dot-net and thought I was a genius. That, my friends, was six years ago, and to this day I kick myself because to this day I am sure I lose a lot of traffic to the owner of the dot-com domain. Now after all this time and 350 AVS sites sitting on it, I am stuck keeping it and can only hope to buy the dot-com version someday. If you cannot get the dot-com, move on; the loss of traffic and additional time and effort needed to overcome the dot-net disadvantage are not worth it.
Along the same lines, sometimes you find a killer domain name. It is short, very relative to your site, and is keyword rich (meaning it contains a keyword or words that are heavily used to search for the niche your site is), make sure to secure not only the dot-com but the dot-net, and if you are looking at it as a pay site at some point I would even secure the dot-org. If you control the domains that are close to yours you don’t have to worry about your competition grabbing a domain very close to yours to market against you.
A great resource that I have found for getting good domains is deleteddomains.com. With its power search option you can put in the keywords you want to include in your domain, check the boxes if you want to include hyphens and numbers, and it will give you all the domains out there that have been deleted for those keywords. I am not a firm believer that a recently deleted domain will help you as far as ranking, but I like the power search option for giving options I may not have thought of while trying to find the perfect domain. DreamStuds came from such a search and it would not have been thought of had it not been for this tool, which is available for free.
I hope that some of my tips will help you choose a successful domain, and I trust we will be reading on the YNOT Masters message boards about your great successes. Good luck to you in your ventures, have fun, but remember that this biz is just that, a business, so treat it that way. Plan your work and work your plan, as someone said not too long ago. So true and so important. Pick your domain for the site you have planned, don’t plan the site on the domain you have picked.
Learn more about building and marketing adult sites at Porn Site Pros. Tony can be contacted at tony@pornsitepros.com, via ICQ# 166558226, or you can call him at 802-479-0053.