If you’ve ever tried to register a .com domain name you’ll soon realise that all of the ones you want have long since been snatched up. Luckily, in recent years there has been a upsurge in the creative use of lesser known top level domain names (TLD’s!)
We now have many known brands like Last.fm (the.fm hails from the Pacific Island of Micronesia) and formally Yahoo owned bookmarking site Delicio.us opting for alternatives to the more ubiquitous .com
There’s an official list of all the worldwide domain name extensions at administrative body IANA. Look through the extensive list of names and you’ll encounter amongst many others,
.IT, ideal for you if you run an IT company perhaps and a unique bit of branding that will make you stand out.Owned by Italy, obviously.
If music is your thing there’s .AM and .FM (for radio stations), .DJ (from East African nation of Djbouti, ideal for, yep you guessed it, DJs) and even .CD (from the Democratic Republic of Congo) if you run a second hand music store and the more widespread .TV, for obvious reasons.
Image via Testking.com "the history of domain names"
Here’s a useful domain name/brand tip for those of you looking for something besides the generic .com and something with a little more originality in the branding.
Scroll through the IANA list and make a note of extensions you might like .LY for instance, which is becoming quite popular with new start ups (a good example is visual.ly a new start up for infographic tools).
Now if I wanted to come up with a snappy name that ended with .ly I’d go over to morewords.com here http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/ly/ and as you can see, you get a list of words ending in LY. You can do the same for any other two letters simply by changing the last two letters of the URL in the browser and you’ll get a bunch of words that may well trigger an idea for your business name. Then you can hunt down that unique domain name that nobody else even dreamed of!
For a quicker way of coming up with domain brand names head over to Domai.nr and have some fun with their suggestion tool.
If you need any help deciphering all of this information and want help with how to register some of the more ‘exotic’ domain names do get in touch with us here at RedGalaxy and we’ll be happy to help.
