Advertising Revenue: Providing content on your site, makes you a publisher. Publishers make money by selling name brand products and services that are related to the site’s content. Merchants with affiliate programs offer thousands of products and services for your site. From Bridal to Hot Sauce.
Big Brands: Smart marketing companies of major name brands are now buying “off-brand” domains to market their products and services. Do you have a domain that they might want? Congratulations, that domain is going up in value.
Brand: Develop your new domain name to feature your brand name products or services. All domain names are unique but there are only so many good ones relevant to your interests.
Competition: Buy related domain names so your competition can’t use them for their benefit and/or against you. What if they bought the domain names that you are thinking about buying? You may never have the opportunity to own them again. And now the domains names that you once liked are now being used against you. Don’t look back and regret not buying the domain names you want today.
Content: Use your new domain name for a blog, hobby site, specialty ecommerce site, community information, photo sharing, friends and family networking and more.
Cost Effective: Your cost is primarily the purchase price of the domain name. Annual renewal fees are less than $10 per year including the ICANN fee.
Credibility: Build sites or park pages so you are monetizing your investment. If you are opening an online business, start with a good domain name. Show your visitors/customers that you are serious about your online venture and, in a few years, the domain will probably appreciate in value even if your business does not take off.
Creative Domain Marketing: See our exclusive list of 2000+ domains that have been used by national brands yet the domain does not contain any brand name. Do you own any domains that a national brand name company might want to use?
Direct Navigation: When a user types YourDomainName.extension into their browser directly without even searching to find your site. Many of our keyword-specific domains enjoy Direct Navigation traffic.
Email: Use your new domain name to host email addresses. Create and use email addresses like sales@YourDomainName.extension or yourname@YourDomainName.extension. You will never have to change your email address again because your email provider/ISP changed.
Ecommerce: Build a storefront and sell your home made salsa or arts and crafts. Point your domain name to your eBay® seller’s page and then give it out to potential customers. A domain name is much easier to put on a business card or advertisement in a newspaper or magazine than a crazy eBay® seller’s list or storefront.
Express Yourself: What do you have to say? Build a political blog site, review the latest electronic gadgets or offer gardening tips. Tell the people what’s good and bad in the world.
Forwarding: Forward your new domain name to your existing website or any other web site/web page you wish. Buy all the related domain names that you can and point them all (masked to prevent duplicate content) to your existing site thus giving your main domain more reach.
Gas Prices: I don’t have any research to back this up but I would guess that people might be driving a little less and staying home a little more. What do people do when they stay home? Check the Internet of course. So, more people online means more people using domain names to get to web sites or parked pages.
Gifts: Buy a domain name for your mother’s hobby or your brother’s business and give it to them as a gift. Give domains to friends, family, co-workers, charities and good causes. See if they will give you a receipt for the value of the donation. Maybe the gift is tax deductible? Ask them for a permanent link back to your site of choice in return.
Grouping: Buy groups of domains when you can, especially if one seller has many that you want. You can probably get a nice package deal and all in one transaction. Buy the plural, the …ed, the …ing, the dash version and others in the keyword, category or industry that interests you.
Hosting: You can host your new domain at dozens of reliable hosts for less than $10 per month. You can change the nameservers (DNS) and hosts as often as you like and your visitors never have to know the difference.
Investment: Hold for price appreciation. Read about recent domain sales, updated each week. Bill Gates said it best:
“Domains have and will continue to go up in value faster than any other commodity ever known to man.“
Yahtzee!!!: If you have enough quality domain names (say one hundred or more) the day will probably come when someone will buy just one that will pay for all the rest. Example – If you have one hundred domains that cost you $10 each per year to renew then sell just one domain for $2000, that’s a 200 times return on your money. I sell 4-5 names a year, that revenue pays for a good chunk of my portfolio.
Keywords: If you bid on keywords at Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing Y!SM or MSN AD Center advertise your existing website, you should own domain names that include those same keywords that are important to your business.
Limited supply: I always find new opportunities to register good domain names. However, If you have a portfolio of domains from years of investing, you are happy knowing prices are continually rising. If you don’t have a good domain portfolio, you had better focus on where you want to be in three years and buy up the domains you think you will be using.
Location, Location, Location: I like dot com’s. more than any other extension or TLD ccTLD but I also really like Geo targeted domains BostonForRENT.com is a perfect example of where and what.
Marketing: YourDomainName.extension is much easier to say, spell and read than geocites.com/whatever/whatever. Looks much better in print too. Keep it short and sweet, nor more than 3 words, stay away from nonsense phrases.
Minipreneurs: No. We didn’t make up this word, Trendwatching.com coined the term. Read their article about “minipreneurs” and how masses of people are getting online to sell items to supplement their income. Trendwatching.com doesn’t really talk about domain names but you can be assured that all these new economy entrepreneurs are going to need domain names, web design and hosting.
Mobility: Consumers are more mobile than ever and now have easy access to the Internet via their cellphones so there are more opportunities for people to use the Internet and visit your domain name or web site. I am not a huge proponent of the .mobi extension. Will this mobile Internet go to the next level thus creating even more demand for domain names? see our post on .mobi tools.
Niche: entrepreneurs, investors and developers settle into a niche, they buy, hold and/or develop the domains they own. Smart domain investors will try to buy more domain names in their niche. You better start buying the domains you want tomorrow or they may not be available again.
Online Advertising Spending: A quick internet search for this term will provide you with plenty of proof that online advertising spending has risen every year for many years and will continue to rise. In 2008 online advertising outstripped newspaper advertising spends for the first time ever.
Today’s domain boom is being fueled primarily by the advertising dollars spent on traffic provided by domain owners. A July report from Jupiter Research predicted that online ad spending will soar to $25.9 billion by 2011. Approximately $12 billion was spent online last year according to figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The report predicts continued gains for search marketing which surpassed display advertising last year with 41% of overall spending (display ads took 34% of the pie). Jupiter Research predicts online ad spending will jump 21% this year. Others expect an even higher growth rate for 2006. Universal McCann forecasts a 25% rise while research firm eMarketer says the number will be over 33%.
Portfolio: Stay diversified! Owning a diverse portfolio of domain names will increase your opportunities to monetize faster and easier. Develop as many of the names as you can and generate as much revenue as you can. A name that has traffic and revenue will sell for far more than just a “good name”. If you have a nice portfolio of domain names, you will be able to pick the domain that’s right for your next online venture… and your next… and your next.
Print Advertisements: If you do any advertising in magazines or newspapers, you want a domain name that will catch the readers’ eye. Also, think about what you pay for one month’s print ad. Spend that amount to buy a good domain. So, if you spend $500 a month in advertising, get yourself a $500 domain name. If your advertising budget for one month is $10,000, there really is no reason that you shouldn’t own and be using a great domain name. MANY great domain names can be purchased for under $10,000.
Professionalism: Don’t dread giving out your web address or your AOL email address. Give them YourDomainName.com and me@YourDomainName.com.
Return on Investment: Most domains cost less than $10 per year for registration at many registrars. If you can make $.03 a day in revenue, you are profitable. Figure 2 cents for the name and 1 cent for the hosting per day. If you can make $.06 a day, you are doubling your money. Imagine if you had a couple hundred domains making $1.00 a day. Sounds like a great job to me!
Pay Per Click Revenue: If you choose to park your domain with a “pay-per-click” revenue provider, they will optimize your domain’s parked page with keywords and links so visitors will find your domain and then click on an advertiser’s link. Each time a visitor clicks on an advertisement, you get paid! Caution though, revenue for paked domains had been on the decline for several years. Google just announced their own parked domain name program. I do not know how well the service works yet. Caveat Emptor
Search Engine Results: Many webmasters argue that having a keyword rich domain will help your site show up better in search engine results. I tend to agree and have hundresd of sites to prove the theory.
Small Annual Renewal fee: Regardless of what you pay to acquire any domain, the following year’s renewal fee will be less than $10. (.tv domains and other country extensions have higher annual renewal fees.)
Supply and Demand: There is obviously a limited supply of quality or unique brand domain names. As Internet use continues to explode around the world and among future generations, good domains will only increase in value.
Think ahead: Wayne Gretsky said he skated to where the puck was going to be, not to where the puck was at the time. Buy domain names that will be popular one to three years out and be patient. Wait for the industry and the market to develop then your investment should appreciate in value substantially. I personally have banked on nano technology.
Viral Marketing: Buy a memorable (brand or keyword) domain name and use it so others can easily pass it along to others so you can enjoy the power of viral marketing.
Visitor Experience: As potential visitors use search engines to find web sites, they are more likely to click on a site with a relevant domain name more than some keyword-keyword-keyword.biz spammy looking domain name.