Lesson #05 The Domain Name
Written By Titmowse

You can buy content, hire graphic designers, solicit web hosts and invest in all sorts of overhead to get your paysite started, but until you spend on an item that costs less than twenty dollars, your paysite is not a site at all. Any store, any magazine and business has a name. Your site needs a special kind of name called a domain name.

A domain is a set of Internet addresses set up in levels.

The top level is the one that identifies the country or purpose of the website. You know these addresses better as .com for commercial, .net for network, .org for organization and country top levels such as .uk for United Kingdom or .to for the country of Tonga. Some new top levels are supposed to become available from the guys that decide these things known as Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN.

The third level is that little bit you see at the beginning of a web address or URL. Different types of computers called servers handle different types of Internet functions. The whole of what we know as the Internet does not route through the same machines. Mail is fed to a mail server, files are uploaded to FTP (file transfer protocol) servers. The www you see at the beginning or third level of a URL is being processed through a web server.

The second level of the domain address is where you come in. This is your domain name. This is the URL that hopefully; thousands and thousands of people will type in their address boxes and bookmark in their favorites folder. The domain is your brand name, store name and business name. Your domain name has been compared to your virtual location. Because the information highway is ultimately intangible, your name is your beacon. The easier to spell, remember or say, your domain name has to say what you do and who you are.

Your domain name is even better if it contains a much-used search term or keyword. Search engines and directories look and list by the domain. The most typed-in keyword on every search engine in every country is sex or it's lexical counterpart.

Unfortunately, almost every possible configuration of the word sex in a phrase or URL has already been purchased/leased by someone else. While it is important for your site to have a name that tells surfers who you are, once they find you a name that is catchy will keep them coming back. One of the most visited adult sites on the Internet is Persian Kitty. It's basically a listing of countless other porn sites and it's name does not imply a list or portal page in the least. Cats are sexual and so is the word kitty, but from first glance, the name of a breed of feline doesn't suggest smut. Nevertheless, once a horny surfer finds it, they never forget its URL: www.persiankitty.com.

You should also bear in mind that successful porn paysites are regimented with powerful forces called lawyers. Registering or trying to register a domain name that is a derivation or slight misspelling of an already known brand name will get you nothing but lawsuits and legal fees. It's best to find a name that has not been used before or one that is for sale. There are vast databases full of abandoned domain names for auction sale. Registrants fail to pay an annual fee and after a period of time the domain becomes the property of the company you registered it with initially.

The registrar of your domain (in a way) has a sort of power of attorney over your domain once you take the time to think of it and register it. How the naming/registering system works is that you can only pay to have rights to the use of your domain in one-year pre-paid increments of which you can only buy a maximum of ten.

Before you have a concept of your site's design, content or theme, you have to have a domain name that's fitting. Before you make a logo graphic, you'll need a domain. Before you can have a site on a paid host that will make you money, you must have a URL to type in or link to. Your domain name can be as short as three characters or as long as 20, but it is the seminal investment in your future as an adult paysite owner.