How I Create Domain Names (Part 2)

In my last post, How I Create Domain Names (Part 1), I looked at using the CONCATENATE function, (in Excel) , especially the shorthand version using the Ampersand (&) to join words to create 2, 3 or maybe more word combinations and reveal new possibilities.

Using Excel you can quickly generate different combinations, but what if you’re having trouble thinking of related words and concepts to use with the starter word?

The answer is to use a site like OneLook.com. They have a reverse dictionary search which will list loads of related words and short phrases that you can use with your starter word, I don’t necessarily use the starter word, often, I use a related word or phrase, in this case I want to try the word ‘house’ as my starter word and I’ll therefore type in ‘real estate’ into the reverse dictionary to show this list.

You can see that it returns 100 results per page and in this case, there are several of those.

What I would then do, is highlight the whole list, then copy and paste into a spreadsheet:

The problem now is to remove the list numbers, (and the dot and space) that’s been pasted with each word. To do this you need to copy and paste this formula into the cell in the next column directly to the right of your pasted list:

=RIGHT(B2,LEN(B2)-SEARCH(” “,B2,1))

Make sure you change the cell reference B2 to the correct reference in your sheet. You can then copy the formula down as far as you wish using the fill handle, giving you a result like this in column C:

Join the words using CONCATENATION as described in the previous post. If you need to remove spaces from some words, highlight the list of words, press Ctrl and H then type a space into the ‘Find what’ box and make sure the ‘Replace with’ box is empty before clicking the ‘Replace all’ button.

You can download an example spreadsheet here.

’til next time.