Introduction
Some time ago I had the idea to create a second blog, a pure technology related blog. I am still owner of the domain but didn’t start to work on this blog as my personal blog here keeps me busy and I couldn’t get used to the idea to manage two blogs at once. But the idea is still not off the table and that is the reason why I still didn’t cancel the domain. At that time, I wanted to think out a good domain name, and I did put a little bit more efforts into it. researched and analyzed my ideas like crazy. Apart from my personal blog here, I had also other websites and domains in the past and when it comes to research of available domain names, I have a lot of ideas that can be very helpful and I want to show you some in this article.
Pen And Paper
If you want to write about a wide range of subjects as I do here on my blog, the name shouldn’t be too specific but if you search a domain name for a niche blog, you could nail it down and find terms that are very related to your niche. There are even other possible ways to think out names but in all cases I suggest you to start with a very common technique, it’s called brainstorming. Yes, I suggest you to start with pen and paper. Write down all terms that you like and that are related to your blog, to your project and ideas. I suggest you to go crazy and write as many words down as you can think of. The more the merrier and if you can come up with a huge list, it will be helpful, but if you can’t you will be able to expand it later on. I will give you some ideas how you can do this.
Domain Name Availability
Before we go into detail, we should know how to check out if a domain is still available and for sale. Most hosting providers offer tools on their sites that you can use to check if a domain name is still free. I suggest you to use domain check tools of big and very well-known companies as you can be sure that they don’t steal and register your thought out domain names. The company 1&1 is for example very reliable and offers a domain checker that you can use to check the availability of a domain. You can use the tool later when you wrote down several potential domain names and on this way you can find out if your ideas are already taken or not.
Fancy Word Combinations
Later, if you check out domain names it will happen that several of your ideas are already taken. There are of course many people who registered domains already and the chance to get a single word domain is very little unless you create your own fancy names as many internet startups did and still do it.
Find Alternative Words
The internet is so overpopulated that even many two-word domains are taken but yet we still shouldn’t worry about it. After brainstorming, you probably have already several terms that you like and if the combinations are already taken, I suggest you to search for synonyms. You can for example take any of your words from the list and put them in the search box of Thesaurus and you will get several similar words, so-called synonyms. There are many more sites and you can also ask Google things like “synonym for journal” if you want to find similar words to “journal”.
Play Some Scrabble
If you search for words that start with special letters, there is this site called Scrabble Finder. Type one letter or even letter combinations in the search field and you will get several suggestions of words that contain the letters. Alternatively you can just ask Google for “words that start with…” and Google will offer your several sites that have a database of words.
Get Keyword Ideas
Take your keywords and put them in the search box of Ubersuggest and you will find a dozen of new keyword ideas that might inspire you. This site is easy to use but if you want a little bit more complexity, you can also use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. I can tell you this tool is fun and very inspiring because you can gather so much ideas there that your list of ideas will grow fast. By the way, this tool can also be used for article keyword research. I think it is a weapon in the arsenal of a webmaster.
More Inspirational Tools
There are all kind of keyword and domain research tools that can help you to get some great ideas and the magazine Mashable did put a nice list together too. I suggest you to try all the tools because it is not only fun to play with them, it will also expand your list of ideas. On this way you can find many alternative words, terms and combinations that otherwise maybe wouldn’t come into your mind.
Conclusion
When you wrote many ideas down, you just need to check if the domains are available and you can do that with the domain checker that I mentioned at the beginning. I tried many of the tools and do use some of them for article keyword research as well. So, this is not only how I found the domain name for my other technology blog, I use them also for writing inspiration and keyword research. I hope it will help you to get creative too. Have fun!
Diary of Dennis 
[ Smiles ] Dennis, you certainly know your stuff.
Thanks Renard. I read a lot about it because it is very interesting. I follow the whole webmaster subject since a decade or so as I had many websites in the past. I still like to write about related subjects at times. Sometimes i do really think I should write about those subjects on my other empy tech blog lol. Maybe I give it another try some day. 😀
[ Smiles ] Dennis, I have noticed that most bloggers would prefer to have a dot com (.com) instead of a dot me (.me), why is that? Is it because a dot me (.me) domain is more expensive than a dot com (.com) domain?
Yes most alternative domains are not that much asked. Here in Germany (.de) is the most used one and even if we could also use (.org) or (.net) and all the other domains, people tend to use the German ending for German websites. For English written websites it’s as you said, people tend to use (.com). I think the main reason might be that they were the first domains and everbody knows a com domain. From my own perspective I would of course use a (.com) for an English site because I assume that it is easier to remind. The thing is that we blogger might know of a dozen of alternative or even new domain endings but the people who find our articles the first time via Google, they might not know it. Reminding the name of a website, that is the first difficulty for your readers but adding an alternate TLD instead of (.com) that creates a second difficulty.
Of course you could use the alternate domain endings to reserve a domain name but if (.com) is already taken, that would mean even if you would rent another TLD for the name, you would know there is someone else already with the same name but another TLD. It’s bad for brand awareness I think and the name might be protected if it is already taken. For creative purpose (.me) domains might be quite cool because you can think out domain names like (love.me) and so. Some people use alternate TLD’s to create fancy domain names. Works with a lot of different domain endings.
If we take the example of (.me) again, it’s by the way the top level domain of Montenegro. When it comes to SEO, there are two different kind of people. Some think that you don’t get ranking boost or ranking penalization with a country TLD. Then there are people who think it will of course give you disadvantage or advantage. I am one of the last group because experienced that my old (.de) websites had a big ranking advantage in Germany over for example (.com) domains. I experience the same now with my (.com) domain of my personal blog here. My site ranks very well for several keywords in the USA for example but the same keywords and articles do not do that good on the German google search page. Some would now argue that it’s logic because no English speaking bloggers should appear in a German language search engine. But I think that is not the main problem. One of my old German websites had articles in both languages. Mainly German but I translated them to English at that time too. Still my main traffic was German traffic and I believe it had to do with my TLD. It was quite hard in general to rank outside of Germany with that domain. So, in my opinion, from SEO perspective it might be harder to rank a country TLD outside of the related country. But (.com) is a very broad domain that just meant “commercial” in the old days. Today it’S not only for commercial sites, it became the most used TLD at some point. It works very well in many countries since it is not a country TLD. Same for (.net) and many others.
Of course, when it comes to SEO, it’s often pure speculation and Google knows more than we do. I wouldn’t like to experiment in this sector… if I would start a German website I would probably use a (.de) domain if I want to rank there. For english sites my first choice is (.com) or something like (.net). Of course if I would create a professional business, I would try to register all common domains if my company would have enough money to do so. On this way you could protect your brandname a little bit. This is often suggested by marketing blogs but that is more business thinking and has nothing to do with us small bloggers 🙂
75% of all website on the Internet uses a dot com domain. This makes it the most popular and also people tend to remember a dot com domain faster. Easier to brand if you ask me.
Yep, that is the reason why so many use dot com domains for websites in English.
I sent you a mail bro, check up
Replied to you 🙂
Because my blog name at wp.com is leafculture, so when i upgraded my domain i want my domain name same with my old blog name. So I’m used dot net (.net). But my fault is didn’t know that i have same domain name like a china website name with dot com (.com). 😦
If I understand you right, the dot com domain is already taken by another person? If so, that’s very sad. 😦 That’s why many people often reserve the most famous domain endings, but of course, this cost more then. However, I think net is cool too, isn’t it? I had dot net domains in the past too and liked them.