By: John Gibb
Unfortunately, if you’re just now registering a domain name, you’re coming to it a little late. People have been buying up names in huge numbers for almost a decade now, and there’s almost nothing left.
It often takes people a little while to grasp the sheer scale of this situation. They desperately try every word and phrase they can think of to describe their website, only to find them all taken. Then they turn to acronyms and abbreviations – and they’re all taken too!
Every word in the dictionary is taken – in fact, every word in all the different English dictionaries there are is taken. Every single three-letter-long domain name is taken – someone owns aaa.com, and aab.com, and aac.com…and, worse, the four-letter ones are running out too! Unless your name is very rare, you’re likely to find that someone already owns it.
What can you do? Well, the simple answer is that you have to get a bit more creative with the name of your website. It’s not enough to just use your name and a simple description – you literally have to come up with something that no-one has ever thought of before.
If you’re having trouble, there are a few things to consider. Firstly, you might have some luck by using your surname combined with what your site is about, if your surname is reasonably rare – this works far better than using place names, unless you live in a small town. You might also think about coming up with a nonsense word – something that is pronounceable, but doesn’t actually mean anything.
If your site doesn’t necessarily need to be international, then you might also consider buying a domain for your own country instead of .com – a co.uk for the UK, for example, or .de for Germany (Deutschland). These spaces are much less polluted. However, you need to make sure that whoever owns the .com doesn’t own a trademark on their name, as you might violate it by registering that name under your own country’s top level.
