Are you struggling to come up with a domain name for your blog or next project? Why not choose a name that sounds like or rhymes with an existing well established website. I thought of this the other day when I was waiting to catch my bus to take me into Seattle for work when I saw this truck drive by with big bold letters plastered on the side - Jobdango.com. Now what site immediately comes to mind when you hear ‘dango’? For me it’s the wildly popular Fandango.com. I checked out Jobdango.com and while it’s a Northwest job search engine and not something related to the movie business it’s easy to see what they’ve done by incorporating ‘dango’ into their domain name.

I’m certain that most people that see the advertisements for Jobdango.com or have heard of the website already have likely heard of Fandango.com. They may even go so far as to believe it’s a partner company. What Jobdango.com has done is used the association from another well known brand and applied it towards their Northwest job search engine Jobdango.com

This advertisement on the side of the truck got me thinking about other websites I’ve seen that have used similiar domain names in an effor to build off of some other websites’ branding success. Some other prime examples I’ve seen are dogster.com and catster.com both of which are named after friendster.com. The only difference is that they’re used for pets. However, it’s safe to say that the creators of dogster.com and catster.com knew what they were doing when they choose domain names with ’ster’ at the end to cash in on the success of friendster.com. Now some of you might be worried that it’s possible you could run into legal trouble for purchasing domain names with this practice in mind; however, as you can see from the above examples they’re different enough that there have been no lawsuits filed yet close enough to cash in off the previously established successful brand.

What are some other examples you’ve seen? Do you believe this is a good way to get a kick start to the branding of your website?