I'm obsessed with generic domains. I own a small portfolio of generic names and I spend an inordinate, almost unhealthy amount of time obsessing on this subject. If it came down to owning a clever website name versus a generic name, it wouldn't even be a choice. I'd take the generic name every time.

Why?

Two reasons:

One is that they're damn near impossible to forget. If we were socializing in a coffee shop and I told you to visit my website InternetMarketing.com you wouldn't forget it. If I said visit SearchMagnetism.com, even though it's a pretty good name, there's a 50/50 chance you'd forget the name.

The other reason is that generic domains name are keyword relevant and therefore rank higher on the search engines.

So, what does this mean for Clickbank marketers? While getting names like InternetMarketing.com would be fabulous, those top-tier names are taken. However, let me show you through an example how to harness the power of a generic domain.

I'm going to pick a product from this week's CBINSIDER.

Best Man Wedding Speech

Now go to the Google External Keyword Tool.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I typed in Best Men Wedding Speech. Here's a screencapture of the phrases that came up with estimated monthly search volume.

Now go to a whois lookup. I like domaintools.com.

I checked a handful of phrases and they were unfortunately registered... It is getting tougher to find available names, but you get the idea. They're still out there if you're persistent.

For example, let's say you were able to register bestmanweddingspeech.com which gets 4,400 keyword searches a month (that's not many, but probably enough to make it worth while). From here you would toss up a word press blog on the domain name and once or twice a week, or less, you'd update your blog with an article, a post, a video. Obviously, you'd monetize the site with affiliate links pointing to best man wedding speech products sold through Clickbank.

Then you would invest some time or money in obtaining back links. See my other post on this subject.

You'd also want to make sure you had properly coded your site with relevant Best Man Speech keywords in title tags, Meta tags.

Having done all this I can 90% guarantee that you'll watch your site climb in the engines and depending on amount and stiffness of competition, there's a healthy chance you'll rank #1 for the phrase you registered. Because of your relevant domain name you would enjoy the lion's share of targeted search traffic on Google, MSN and Yahoo. Plus your generic name will rank high for other similar keyword combinations. And best of all, it takes far less SEO work to keep your site ranked high, often none, after you do the initial push.

I usually tell people to get the .com for many reasons I won't list here. .com carries more SEO weight than other domain extensions. However, .net and .org are second and third best. They'll rank higher than a clever name always.

I'll have more on domain names in the coming weeks and months.

UPDATE:

Ron asks: What are your thoughts on using hyphenated versions of generic domain names? Example: best-man-wedding-speech.

Answer: Before getting the hyphenated I would first try to get the .net or .org. However, they can and do work for the same reasons generic domains work. I've never purchased one myself, but see them being used with success all the time. I would never BRAND my site on a hyphenated name. By that, I mean, I wouldn't use a hyphenated name as my official business name. People will forget to add hyphens when typing in the URL and you'll end up sending free traffic to the unhyphenated name. I would only use it for picking up search traffic.

Speaking of hyphenated URLs, something I would consider is finding the highest traffic keyphrases out there and seeing if the hyphenated names are available. Example, imagine if you could get a phrase like body-building.com or spy-ware.com? You'd be on your way to making a truckload of money. Granted, those are highly competitive phrases, but having the phrase in your URL would give you an added competitive edge.