Forbes.com - Magazine Article
 Special Report
 Master The Domain Name Game
 Maureen Farrell, 10.31.06, 12:00 PM ET
 Back in 1993, when the Web was young, Bill Fisher got his hands on a particularly attractive address: www.beer.com. He
 later sold it to Labatt Breweries of Canada for an undisclosed sum (somewhere in the seven digits, he says).
 Fisher also nabbed www.budweiser.com and www.guinness.com , though he knew copyright law would catch up with him.
 To avoid an annoying legal tussle, Anheuser-Busch coaxed the Budweiser Web address from Fisher by filling his office with
 beer. "You can't drink that much quickly enough," he says. "We had to give it away to clients." Guinness did one better by
 flying Fisher and his friends to Ireland for a factory tour and, yes, many pints.
 If you want to do business on the Web, having a memorable domain name clearly helps. Unfortunately, snagging one is
 harder these days because large companies and domain "squatters" like Fisher gobbled up a lot of the catchy real estate
 years ago.
 How to cast a wider net? While the ".com" suffix is the online standard, you could probably find an ideal domain name that
 ends in ".biz" or ".net," says David McGuire, communications director for the Center for Technology and Democracy, an
 Internet policy think tank. The problem here is two-fold. First, the ".com" suffix is the default setting on every browser--
 meaning that if shoppers type in only part of the Web address, they probably will be shuttled to a site that ends in ".com."
 Second, the big search engines like Google and Yahoo! hunt for ".com" domains before any others.
 "Everything but '.com' is less valuable real estate today," says Mark Goldstein, president of the Arizona-based International
 Research Center, a technology consulting firm. "None of the alternatives has really taken off, because people are not as
 likely to type those [addresses] into their browsers."
 If you must have ".com" in the name, get creative. Be sure to build a name containing several keywords related to the
 products or services your company offers. Don't be afraid to try names with three, four or five words linked together, says
 Tim Cohn, an independent marketing consultant and the author of the forthcoming book For Sale By Google. The most
 popular words attract exponentially more eyeballs than the rest--one reason that Google offers a helpful service that tracks
 the most popular search terms.
 For example: Say you're a shoe retailer in Atlanta. If you type "Atlanta shoe stores" into Google and sort by popularity, you'll
 find the most-searched phrases are: "Atlanta shoes," "Atlanta shoe," "Atlanta dance shoes" and "Atlanta shoe stores."
 Given this information, Cohn suggests going with the most fluidly spoken versions, either www.atlantashoes.com or www.
 atlantashoestores.com. (Those domain names happen to be taken.) For more on search-engine optimization, see:
 "Marching Up The Search Stack."
 Once you've settled on a domain name, you have to buy it. Domains cost between $7 and $15 per year at domain sellers
 (or registrars) GoDaddy.com and Register.com. These middlemen pay a fixed fee to Verisign, which controls the domain
 industry under the auspices of an international body called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
 (which, oddly enough, reports to the U.S. Department of Commerce). It's a good idea to also buy between three and 20
 names that are close to your primary address or that could be confused with it. "Build a little protective sphere," says
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 Forbes.com - Magazine Article
 Goldstein.
 But with 105 million names already in use, chances are someone else already owns it. (You can find out who they are at
 www.domaintools. com.) As with tangible real estate, if you want something truly valuable, you'll probably have to pay up--
 there is a robust secondary market for domain names, as Fisher pleasantly discovered. In this market, buyers negotiate
 directly with sellers. If that seems unsettling, intermediaries like Moniker.com and Escrow.com--for a $250 to $500 fee--will
 help ensure that buyers actually pay and sellers truly transfer title to the address.
 Whether by crafting a great new name or wresting one from a previous owner, online retailers would do well to master the
 domain game. Says Cohn: "For a small-business owner, it's better to leverage search engines than to move a mountain
 [through advertising] on their own."
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