Why “IMMania”?

I thought I should talk a little about the choice of the domain name for this blog. It’s sort of become a bit of a sideline for me, more like a game actually, in coming up with domain names that may turn out to have some value down the line. I even have a membership with Afternic and occasionally read posts in the forums there. I haven’t actually sold a domain yet, but it’s always in the back of my mind.

Now, I’m not sure how much demand there is for buying personal blogs and I don’t think I’ll sell the domain name attached to it, but I applied the same criteria to choosing this one as I do others in my portfolio — 44 names and growing. I also registered “IMManiac.com”, but didn’t like it as much and it has one more character.

Here’s my list of qualities in picking a domain name:

• Keyword-focused — best if the keyword phrase the home page is targeting is the basis for the name.
• Brandable — if the keyword phrase is not available or the site lends itself to branding, then I’ll go in this direction. That’s what I did for IMMania.com
• Always register .com domains — sure, it’s much tougher to find good available names with a .com extension, but they’re just worth more and also have more credibility. Maybe I waste too much time finding good .com names, but like a mentioned previously, it’s a game for me.
• Never use hyphens — there’s a lot of debate about whether or not Google penalizes for hyphens. Personally, I’ve seen enough hyphenated sites with top rankings in Google to believe they don’t care, but I don’t like the way they look.
• Try to keep them short — I’ve broken this rule in the past and now regret it. Long domain names hurt their value in so many ways. You lose the benefit of type-ins and it also hurts with PPC advertising since it looks awkward and also limits what you can put in the display URL.

Well, that’s the short list. Some points may be kind of obvious and others may not be the best choice, but that’s what I’m going by for the time being. As far as “IMMania”, as you can imagine, anything with Internet Marketing or IM for that matter was taken for .com’s. “Internet Marketing” no matter how keyword targeted is just too long for my liking.

So I went with what I thought was a brandable name and “mania” kind of sums up what IM has become for me. It’s really more like an obsession, but mania has fewer letters and I think it also has a nicer ring to it.