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Thinking about domains

Written by: Seth Godin

Article Overview: Thirteen years ago, Josh Quittner wrote an article in Wired that almost made me richer than Donald Trump.

Thinking about domains

Thirteen years ago, Josh Quittner wrote an article in Wired that almost made me richer than Donald Trump.

He wrote about how many domain names were up for grabs, including McDonalds.com.

Inspired, I sat down and registered hundreds of them. I was about to hit the 'buy' button when my office mate persuaded me that it was somehow unethical. Persuaded, I only ended up buying one or two generic terms.

Shoot.

Anyway, a decade and a half later, boom over, domains persist. Many are worth a fortune, tens of thousands are worth a semi-fortune.

Why are they still worth so much?

For a long time, clueless surfers would type a word into the address bar of their browser, figuring it was some sort of magic search engine. Type "gloves" into the address bar of Safari, and yes, it will take you to www.gloves.com.

But Firefox and others are wising up and connecting that spot to the search engines. Type "gloves" into Firefox and you'll automatically go to the number one result on Google. Research shows that the number of people who accidentally end up on these sites is going down. So why the value?

I'm going to argue that it comes from two things.

1. Commitment. Because there's ony one "dot com" TLD and no serious contenders, there's only one neighborhood for business online. You're either on Fifth Ave. (or Rodeo Drive, your choice) or you're not. If you build a site at mexicansugarskull.com, you're making it really clear to the surfer that you care about this topic, that you're here to stay and that you can be trusted.

2. Focus. Similar, but not quite the same. By having a domain that matches what you do, you are able to focus the attention of the surfer. They know what to expect before they get there, and you can spend less time explaining yourself. The web already offers too many choices--this way, your site doesn't have to.

I think this can help lead us to some useful strategies. If you own domains:

Reinforce the idea of commitment. Don't use generic photos or standard layouts. The incremental effort to make your domain look like it sounds, to demonstrate your commitment through your actions, is very small, but worth it.
If you don't own a domain that's a perfect match (and that's most of us):

Make up for the fact that your domain is imperfect by using design, testimonials and other substantial cues to remind people just how committed you are.
Don't hesitate to create multiple domains for your efforts if you think it will help your visitors focus.

Over the last few weeks, Squidoo has launched a number of new domains to take advantage of this focus impulse: Squidbids, Squidvids and Squidwho, to name a few.

I've been amazed at how quickly people 'get it' when they visit each domain, and how productive the effort has been. The internet has taught people what to do when they see a domain. It's not just an address, it's the first bit of marketing.

One last bit of backward thinking: if you're looking to start an online business, consider finding a great domain and build the business around it, not the other way around. If you subscribe to the snapnames newsletter, you can see which interesting domains are about to be sold for not much money. No guarantees as to how effective this service is, but it's a neat way to think about what to build next.

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  #1 Gorilla Marketing Strategy: Own Your Brand on Google
  Making Money Off Domains

Article Tags: boom, business online, contenders, domain names, donald trump, firefox, generic terms, gloves, google, grabs, josh quittner, magic search engine, mcdonalds, office mate, rodeo, safari, search engine type, search engines, surfers, tld



Related Forum Posts
Re: Domain name sugestion - [quote:78bztc2j]1.) Your clients won't type in dashes when looking for your site 2.) If you have dashes, your site could easily be confused with the domain name without dashes.[/quote:78bztc2j] Very true! Dashes simply make it harder to tell people your domain and harder to remember. Also most "type in" traffic would type it in without the dashes. There's also some speculation that Google likes domains without dashes a little more, but I am not convinced on that one. I have many domains with dashes and overall I don't think it matters much. However, if you can get a good one without dashes it can only help.
Re: Will Donald Trump Run For President? - LOL I tried a few domains too but all the ones I wanted were already taken. Looks like all the savvy marketers are jumping on that potential goldmine.
Your initial investment - I did it the long, yet it my opinion more rewarding way. I started out with an initial investment of 50 GBP. Which at the time was about 120$. I started a little (crappy) webhost. I had a template made and a crude CMS integrated and we started out with a reseller plan. It never really grew hugely but we had maybe 20 people hosting with us. It wasn't what I enjoyed though, I don't like sitting back and watching other people make websites and I just host them, I wanted to get in there so I bought about three domains and found a number of people leaving the industry and picked up some bulk packages for super cheap. I had no idea what I was doing really I just did impulse buying. Slowly, some of these domains started to sell (heck, not for the prices I could of sold them for though ) And I got hooked! So, with my little profit from selling some of the names I bought some more and so on and so on. Then I started developing some of my names and selling them for much higher prices (BINGO!) So I carried on doing this for about a year. No, I develop and sell my own sites and create and sell my own software. Yes, I have been scammed along the way, but you live and learn. That's about it really. I have made an amazing ROI so far and I have no intentions of stopping!
Re: THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD...RIGHT NOW!!! - Success = Thinking (Head) + Heart (Feeling / Interest) + Hand (doing/ action). Success - H3 Robert
Re: Another Wordpress Website! - I love it! I think you did an excellent job. The suggestion Evan has given would be the only things I would also maybe change. What theme/plugins/whatever did you use to make this site? I know it's wordpress but it doesn't have that sort of feel to it. I'd like to make something similar on a couple of my domains.


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