Once your team settles on a business plan, the first challenge is: how do you come up with and register a short, memorable domain name?

If you search for domains directly at a registrar, you’ll find that virtually every short, desirable domain is already taken — especially .com ones. So what can you do? There are two approaches:

1. Buy Someone Else’s Domain

Much like China’s real estate market, most domains are actually sitting idle. Sedo.com is the world’s largest domain marketplace. You can register on Sedo and search for your desired domain — there’s a good chance it’s already listed for sale. Unless it’s an extremely popular keyword, most domains go for just a few hundred dollars, which is quite reasonable.

2. Snag Expired Domains

Domains, like rent, require annual renewal. When a domain expires and isn’t renewed, it gets deleted and returns to “unregistered” status, at which point anyone can register it again. Unlike apartments, where newer is better, the age of a domain doesn’t matter much — someone else’s discarded domain can become your treasure.

Due to business closures, forgotten renewals, and various other reasons, hundreds of thousands of domains expire and get deleted worldwide every day. This has turned “sniping freshly deleted domains” into a sizable business. Pool.com is the largest expired domain catching service. They publish daily lists of expiring domains and help you catch them for just $60 per successful catch — no fee if unsuccessful. Based on my experience, Pool’s success rate is quite impressive. Highly recommended.

Here’s how to do it: Visit Pool.com and click the “Deleting Domains” menu at the top, then click “Download the Full List” at the bottom to download the complete list of domains about to be deleted. Once unzipped, the list is a text file with one domain per line — roughly 200,000 to 300,000 domains in total. Reading through all of them would take days. The solution? If you’re on Linux or Mac, just run a simple Shell script:

#!/bin/sh
fname="$1″
exec<$fname
regex='^([a-z]{1,1})([a|e|i|o|u]{1,1})([a-z]{1,4})\.com(.+)'
while read line
do
    if [[ "$line" =~ $regex ]];then
        echo $line
    fi
done

Save the above source code to a file with a .sh extension, such as pool.sh, then open the terminal and run it in this format:

sh pool.sh xxxxx.txt (where xxxxx.txt is the text file you downloaded and unzipped)

This Shell script reads each domain entry, checks whether it’s a .com domain of 6 characters or fewer with a vowel as the second letter, and if so, prints it out.

Why require a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) as the second letter? Because according to phonetic rules, having a vowel in the second position makes the domain far more pronounceable. Think facebook, youtube, vimeo, mint, techcrunch, google, yahoo — they all follow this pattern. Twitter is a rare exception where the first two letters form a double-consonant onset, pushing the vowel to the third position.

Using this script’s filter, I find at least a dozen 5-character .com domains every day that are far better than vancl.com. In this sense, domain hunting can leverage collective wisdom — no need to rack your brain only to find everything you think of is already taken.

If you understand basic regular expressions, simply modify this rule line:

regex='^([a-z]{1,1})([a|e|i|o|u]{1,1})([a-z]{1,4})\.com(.+)'
to filter for whatever domains you want. For example, for 6-digit-or-fewer pure numeric domains: regex='^([0-9]{1,6})\.com(.+)'

From a long-term operational perspective, here are some unwritten rules for domain registration:

1. Avoid .cn domains — personally, I’m not a fan.

2. No matter how cheap, never use a Chinese domain registrar. There are only three choices for registrars: 1. Godaddy.com 2. Godaddy.com 3. Still Godaddy.com

3. Avoid numbers and hyphens whenever possible — they’re hard to remember.

4. Try not to include “china” or “cn” in the domain — it’s too on the nose.

A few personal thoughts: in today’s world of scarce domain resources, you might also consider alternative TLDs like .cc, .me, .la, and so on. These still have plenty of untapped resources that registrars haven’t scooped up. Take my blog’s domain, imzl.com — a domain is just a front door. What truly matters is the quality of your site.

Article adapted from: @meditic — please credit when sharing.