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Success for your online business is comparable on many levels to your traditional storefront business and can be summed up in much the same axiom: location, location, location. Your business domain name, your location on the Internet, is a crucial piece in branding your company and marketing that brand as well as maintaining your identity. You want to make absolutely certain you pick the right domain name.

Unfortunately, most of the great domain names, at least in the dot com arena, are already taken. Domain names that are words found in an English dictionary are gone, and have been listed with various Internet registrars for years. Three letter combination domains are either owned and driving traffic to their owners, or are nicely tucked away in a domainer's portfolio, just waiting for the perfect client to come along and offer outrageous sums of money to purchase one of them.

So, what's an online entrepreneur supposed to do if all the quality domain names are gone? Well, first of all, there are still some good names available and you may be able to find a domain name on the world wide web that is in keeping with your vision for your business with just a little bit of searching. Today, there are several smaller registrars such as The Compass and NameCheap.com that are able to offer domain registration prices at or below what the big boys charge. Also, most hosting companies offer registration of top level domain names at a modest markup.

Secondly, the option to purchase a domain name from someone who currently owns the one you are looking for remains open. If the registered domain does not show up by typing the url in the address bar of your favorite browser, or if you get what looks like a search page, the domain may be for sale. For the most part, the price may be negotiable.

When negotiating for a domain name, there are several factors that can influence the final price. Some of these are:

* length of title, the shorter the better
* number of words, with two or fewer being optimum
* length of time since original registration
* current traffic and/or revenue to the site
* buyer's perceived need - from your perspective
* buyer's projected need - how anxious you appear to the seller
* seller's motivation to sell


As with any major purchase, some preliminary knowledge and a good deal of research are required to make the best deal. There are several tools to help. For instance, the whois page at The Compass can provide a ton of useful information.

By typing helium.com into the search box, the resulting information reveals a physical address for the company, a phone number, a fax number, a potential contact email address and the original date of registration for the domain. May of 1997 in this case.

Another tool can be found at alexa.com. Enter the domain name you are interested in, and Alexa will provide you with valuable information as you begin your negotiations. Bear in mind that tools such as Alexa, and other traffic or link reporting tools are not necessarily operating in real time, so there may be some level of discrepancy between what these tools report and what the owner of the domain tells you. Be wary of the asking price if that disparity appears overly large.

Tools such as the Google keyword tool are real time. This one can read the current content on a domain and report on the keywords and other information.

The domain name you want may be taken, but that does not necessarily mean that it is unobtainable.

Learn more about this author, Michael Raymond.
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