.Com Investment Strategy
Focus on .Com Premium Domain Names
by John Deneen
Only Buy .Com Simple reason, the world is being trained to type in dot com (.com). So much so, if you promote anything else, you'll waste time and money. If you invest your time and money to promote YourBusiness.net, you will watch as a large number of people respond to your marketing by going to YourBusiness.com. I made this mistake myself with my first company. I didn't get far before I realized the dot net domain name confused my clients, my prospects, and even my employees. You can't beat dot com and traffic is too expensive to waste. Yes, I can think of exceptions, for example, it make sense to buy alternative domain name extensions defensively or for SEO purposes. But as a strategy, don't make a major investment in those alternatives. As a technology, dot com is the standard - as a location, dot com is main street - and over time, the volume of promoters assimilated to dot com will continue to fortify this reality.
Buy Premiums Domain Names Two factors make a domain premium: intuitiveness and the size of the online market . As a general rule, intuitive domain names are one, two, or three words together, or a common phrase, which, when followed by dot com, gives your target audience a clear sense of what they will find at the website. Transparency is another way to describe this. As for size of the market, you should focus on how big the market is, and importantly, how big the online portion of the market is. To understand market size, you should look at who is in that market. Studies on market size in niche categories are challenging to find (if you know of some, share them with me). A good place to start research is with advertising programs at Google and Overture. You can see what advertisers are spending per click on different keywords in different niches to gauge how competitive the online marketplace is.
Avoid Legal Scraps & Collect the Set What happens when two businesses are in the SAME online market and have striking similar domain names? For example, say Battlestation.com and Battlestations.com are two different online retailers of paintball equipment. Their domain names are confusingly similar; so one or the other might initiate a legal cause of action against the other. The best course of action is to try and avoid this situation from the start by collecting the set of similar and potentially confusing domain names. So after you've acquired a premium domain name, be sure to defensively register every variation available, and go trolling for the remainder.
Consider Development BEFORE Selling By developing your premium domain name, you can often add value in far greater proportion than the costs of development. Undeveloped premium domain names have real value and are a proven investment, but they are much like undeveloped lots of prime real estate. There are many more buyers for a rented out building at a great location, than there are for empty lots of prime real estate. That said, the development of a commercial website at a premium domain name is essentially a business start up. And most business start ups end in failure. So you have to know what you are doing and weigh the risks. (You can minimize your risks by using a highly experience website development team, like the team at Niche Sites LLC.
Strategy Execution Let's use this website as our case study. I started with the DomainNameMarketplace.com, a three word domain, followed by dot com. It is a premium domain name because it gives you, my target audience, a clear sense of what you can expect to find here, namely a place where domain name buyers and seller can find each other. In fact, I'm focusing on premium domain names, and I own PremiumDomainNameMarketplace.com, but while that domain name is arguably more transparent, it is four words and I believe too long. So I went with DomainNameMarketplace.com and counted on you noticing for yourself that this site lists only premium domain names - unlike other sites that will list any old domain. I also acquired and refer to MktPL.com as a shorter version for you regular visitors. To cover my bases, I acquired the following domain name set:
- DomainNameMarketplace.com
- PremiumDomainNameMarketplace.com
- MktPL.COM
- DNMktPL.COM
- Domain-Marketplace.com
- Domain-Name-Marketplace.com
- Domain-NameMarketplace.com
- Domain-NameMarketplaces.com
- DomainName-Marketplace.com
- DomainName-Marketplaces.com
- DomainNameMarketplaces.com
- DomainNameValuation.com
- DomainNameValuations.com
- PremiumDomain-Names.com
- Premium-DomainName-Marketplace.com
- Premium-Domain-Name-Marketplace.com
- Premium-DomainName-Marketplace.com
- DomainNameLiquidation.com
- DomainNameLiquidations.com
- DomainNameLiquidity.com
- Domain-Name-Liquidation.com
- Domain-Name-Liquidations.com
- DomainLiquidation.com
- DomainLiquidations.com
- Domain-Liquidation.com
- Domain-Liquidations.com
- PremiumDomain-Names.com
Then, I invested time and money into developing this site, with help from my team (thanks Caroleigh and Jennifer). Our official launch was on Friday, Market 14, 2008!
DomainNameMarketplace.com PLUS Website can be purchased, contact me!
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