eComm Tips

In my last post I gave you some guidelines for coming up with domain names. What I recommend to most people is that you should come up with 15-20 different names that you like, then check the availability all at once. On average you’ll probably end up with 4-5 that are still available. But sometimes it’s hard to come up with that many names on your own. That’s where DomainsBot.com comes in!

DomainsBot is a cool little tool that can help you come up with more domain names than you could think of on your own. Granted, a lot of them aren’t very good, but it can at least help you get started or help you add to your list. Here’s what their home page looks like:

First thing you want to do when you get to DomainsBot is type in 2-3 words that you think you would want to have in your domain name. As you’re typing, you’ll see a little box start to appear below the search box. You can ignore this box. Just click on “Search” when you’re typed in the words you’re typing. That will take you to the search results. Before we start going through this list, we need to filter the list a little bit. So if you scroll down the right hand side a little bit you’ll see a blue area called LiveBot. Here’s what the first part will look like:

One thing with DomainsBot that can be helpful is they don’t just look for the phrase that you typed in, but they also look for synonyms of those words as well. Sometimes you’ll get a bunch of synonyms, sometimes you’ll only get a few. Look through the list and decide if you really need any of these. Most of the time I just delete all of them. To delete them, just click on the box next to the word and then hit “Delete Synonym” at the bottom of each section.

After that we need to filter the View Only area of LiveBot. Here’s what it looks like so you can make sure you’re looking at the right thing:

For this area, with the Extensions we only want to worry about the .com. In the Status section we only care about what’s available, and in the Include section you can un-check everything (unless you really want to have bad words in your domain name LOL). Then click on “Update Results” and it will filter the list for you.

Once you’ve filtered the list, go through it and write down any of the domain names that interest you. One other thing I’ve found is that when DomainsBot says that a name is available, its accurate about 95% of the time. The registrar has the final say.

So that’s DomainsBot! Great little tool for coming up with domain names if you get stumped!