Do you have a great product or service that you can create a market for?

The first and the most obvious step would be to find a domain name that will be a traffic magnet. There are many reasons to choose certain domain names while avoiding others, so let's get an idea of what to look for.

MISSPELLINGS
Due to the recent overbuying of domain names one of the tactics that hosting companies are using is to promote misspelled domain names.  While it makes sense that a hosting company has neither the time nor inclination to dig up  good domain names for their clients, it can kill a new business in a heartbeat.  It's simply a matter of getting accounts in and set up as quickly as possible, disregarding the negative consequences to the clients chance for success.  The odds that a misspelled, one key off, or bad grammar domain will work are zero to rarely.

Examples of the use of Misspellings =Jewelry/Jewellery: Jewlry, Jewelery ~ One Key Off = Google: Googlw or Googlr (R and W side the E on your keyboard) ~ Bad Grammar Plays = Sales: Sells/Salez/Sellz

REVERSED GRAMMAR
Having keywords in the domain name will always pull better, from the search engines perspective at least.  However, it won't ensure the domains pulling power from the human perspective.  An example of this would be Salesauto.com.  While the keywords are there, it simply isn't conducive to a proper search term and therefore inherits poor grammatical pull.  It simply isn't natural for a human to think in reverse.  Trying to be as natural as possible in the way a human thinks when doing a search might be as important as how a search engine reads the domain.  Keep this in mind when crafting your new domain name.

PLURAL vs SINGULAR
The whole point of targeting a market is to also target the "searched" keyword phrases that will be used to find you.  The key here is "SEARCHED", the terms must be searched for consistently. Subtle changes in terms can have huge effect on a keyword or phrases organic pulling power. 
Let's look at a couple of examples:

MP3PLAYERS  Returns 56,000,000 results and is searched 22,000 times per month
MP3PLAYER  Returns 128,000,000 results and is searched 165,000 time per month

The singular instance of this term has nearly 8 times the organic search value.

Here's something interesting, if the term is changed to MP3 PLAYER it sends the "monthly searches" to over 20,000,000 with 178,000,000 returns! This leads me to believe that mp3-player.com could probably be developed to grab a very large organic market share of these searches.

To find organic search values set up a free Adwords account, go into your manager and then use the keyword tool to see how many monthly/yearly average searches your terms actually pull. The returns that a term has when you do a search are the amount of pages there are in the Google universe with that term on it. Having a high return value simply means there are a ton of pages that also use the term.

DASHES (-) 
One of the biggest mistakes is to underestimate the power of the keywords within a URL.  While dashes make some domainers run for cover, I like to use them as brand protection.  Considering that you can own strong keyword rich domains by simply placing a dash between the keywords within the domain name merits consideration. Of course it depends on the keyword terms you want to target.  I do not recommend investing in a name with more than one dash (-) and only if it separates two very strong keywords. Examples of this would be; Car-Sales.com or Free-Software.com, Download-Music.com and so on. Names like these (dash included), can pull massive amounts of organic traffic on their own. Keep in mind that Google strips the dash from a URL.  This means that it will see the keywords as being grammatical in nature. Auto-sale.com would pull and rank strong for the search  "Auto Sales".  This effect can actually pull harder than if you had no dash in the URL, in some cases.

Primary keywords are by nature the best pulling terms possible.  The reason a single syllable primary keyword is so expensive is due to the awe-inspiring organic pulling power it has.  This gives us a clue to why Bank of America paid over $1m for LOAN.com and why FUND.com recently sold for over $8m.

Domain investors dislike dashes because they feel it hurts their type-in traffic and may send surfers to the non-dashed sites. In a sense this might be true, but only if their sites are developed exclusively for type-in traffic and not as a primary business website. The majority of organic traffic comes from searched terms rather than as a typed-in visit, so this notion contradicts itself much of the time. Get a good keyword domain to the top SERP for good terms and you won't even miss the type-in traffic.

TLD's (EXTENSIONS)
Dot com vs everything else. 

While dot com's are the best choice, the chances of getting a good .com for registration value has become a thing of the past, sort of a bygone era at this point in time. Have no fear though because there's always .net, .org and the 2nd tier .biz, .info and .us domains. Did he just say to buy a .info domain? Yes, there's no reason to fear these extensions if the keywords are right! Once again I'll use the example of one of the most visible guru's in the search marketing field. He owns and developed search-marketing.info and just the fact that he would invest in such a domain merits some consideration. If you've heard of SEOBook then you know who Arron Wall is I'm sure. Take a look at his keyword rich, with a dash, .info and then decide what possibilities these domains might hold for you. 


The final conclusion is to find a domain name that is keyword rich yet short and sweet.
Since Google serves nearly 60% of the search market you'll want to go straight to the source when doing your keyword research and discovery for domain name prospects.  Create a free adwords account and use the keyword tool to discover terms that are related to your industry or niche and that are also searched consistently.  The higher the search returns the bigger the pie to split with other sites. Avoid having to brand your name because you'll have to market and promote an unrelated domain name and you'll be starting out with a disadvantage. By seeking out a keyword based name with terms that have a history of being searched you'll inherit a portion of those results regardless of the extension.

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