Getting an unregistered domain name

[the cougar]

Hi

I am a noob but learning as much as I can. Being a wannabee web designer also, I am trying to learn about buying domain names, building sites on them to get traffic, to get $ and eventually sell the sites.
My question is, imagine I pick a field that I know, let's say "Golf" (I actually hate golf just taken for example, no clue about golf.) and instead of buying a somewhat affordable registered golf domain name for my site, I actually create a brand new one, even if it's a 3 or 4 word domain name.
So let's say I have "1stwordgolf3rdword.com" (Replace 1stword and 3rd word with actual words.) and since I know a bunch of stuff about golf, I am able to build a good site with articles, reviews and whatever.
Do you think that strategy would work or you would still spend the $ and get a premium golf domain name to start with?

Thanks to all

Patrick

 

[Spade]

Consider this.... In the real world you decide you are a great toy maker. So you want to open up a shop. You decide to save money and instead of getting a great location in a bussy mall, you opt for the location way outside of town. After a few weeks, your wondering why no one has visited your shop... you begin to wonder if opting for the more expensive premium location was a smarter decision....

Guess what? It was!

Dont go crazy, but acquire yourself a decent domain name. By the sounds of what you trying to do, if you expect to have a premium site, you need to have a premium name.

 

[cache]

it does not hurt to experiment with cheap name first.

 

[Keynes]

There are quality, unregistered niche domains out there -- they won't be great, but you can find a solid 2 word combo -- use domain spinners/suggestors or look around the forum. Good luck!

 

[VURG]

If your some business with a high probability of spending $100,000+ on a marketing campaign for your website in the next few years, than it comes across to me a pretty stupid to go cheap on the domain name and pick something that is harder to remember (less effective marketing) and has no traffic associated with it.

However, if you require a domain for some site that you don't know that you will end up investing a lot of time of money in, then you shouldn't spend $5000 on a name. It's better to experiment with something cheaper. I like using instantdomainsearch.com to find names.

 

[estibot.com]

I agree that you can test drive your development idea with a regfee name, then upgrade later. I did this and it did not harm my SEO ... on the contrary. There was a couple of weeks of "dead air" and after that, pagerank jumped from 0 to 4. However, I also agree with the posters that having a great domain name is essential if you really want to succeed. A keyword rich name will help, but then again a short, memorable one is just as good if not better than a keyword name- depends on what you're going to do really - start a golftube or go for golfclubreviews ..dotsomething.

I was inspired by your post to search for available golf names and I posted the results in the "available domain names" thread. Just shows that you can still find, if not great, then at least decent names for reg fee.

But .com names are hard to find. Here's some of the ones I came up with, that are still available:

golfclubclub.com
golfbeautiful.com
wejustgolf.com
golfgentleman.com
golfauthor.com
golfcomment.com
golfroll.com
tobetogolf.com
golfzebra.com

Other tld's are posted in the other thread.

 

[VURG]

here's some more I was inspired to find:
creategolf.com
phenominalgolf.com
yourgolfsupplies.com
greatgolfer.net
greatergolfer.com

 

[the cougar]

Thanks for all the suggestions and help, it's really helpfull. I think I will stick with creating a new domain name for now as I am a rookie with too many ideas and questions. Or maybe buy a cheapo name for up to $5, as suggested by some of you, it's great for practice.

Anymore ideas please post, I am keeping an eye on this thread.

Thanks a lot

Patrick