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04.12.10 Understanding The Truth About Website Domainers  By Todd MalicoatFirstly, I think domainers are geniuses. They are the only group of people that I know that can work as little as they do, and make as much as they do. Top level domainers are the TRUE optimizers, and saw the biggest gapping hole in the economics of the web ever created, and are now driving trucks of money through it. The true pioneers and geniuses within the community have started to develop an appreciation of what it takes to create successful online properties instead of just making money from parked landing pages. Unfortunately there is still a lot of laziness and blindness to some of the myths their community has helped to perpetuate. The thoughts below are from nearly a decade purchasing ~500 domain names of which I think only 10% at best hold very strong value. The rest are stinkers that I should probably not pay the $6 a year hosting if I was more dilligent with my accounting and renewal tracking. I have been a lurker in domain and affiliate communities for years. I think it's time to point out some of the domainer myths as the world's of SEO's and domainers start to collide, and the best domainers realize they need to actually develop their properties to continue to reap the rewards of their investments. Seeing "potential" through to fruition is both rewarding and extremely challenging (for a bit of credibility at this point, I invested, helped develop, and ultimately exited from CollegeDegree.com just over 3 years ago to help fund future projects.) A perfect storm is brewing from the climate of need from marketers needing top domains and domainers needing marketing talent. It takes a lot to build a great site - so you might as well do it on a domain that people will remember when you finally put it in front of them. Landing page revenues are decreasing, and users are a bit more saavy, so many of the smart domainers are doing their best to at least develop sites on their domains to hedge their bets on big ticket domain valuations with some base level website monetization. It will definitely only continue to be more difficult to capture the "free traffic" of organic search, only as the myth that it should have ever been "free" in the first place is finally being dispelled. We are FINALLY seeing tools to project the value of a site's organic search traffic (like SEMRush, SpyFu, and Aaron's awesome competitive analysis tool) to properly quantify at least a ball park range of the value of "free organic traffic", and make projections of bottom line revenue based on these projections accordingly. The really sharp domainers, have been reaching out to folks in the SEO community, and have been attempting to learn about development and driving more traffic. To properly understand the myths, I think we must first take a look at how I appraise potential domain names (primarily for the intention of development). 1. Search term value (cost per click) 2. Exact match search term volume 3. Overall query diversity (is there longtail from the exact match that is valuable?) 4. Brand-ability (how easy is it to remember and type in) 5. Domain top level extension (.net/.orgs are still a great deal worth 10 - 20% of .com value - everything else is 2nd tier) 6. Potential type in traffic (only for very top level keyword.coms in select verticals, and really mainly good for branding) 7. Ease of future development (How easy is it to realize the "potential" of a brandable domain creating content, software, etc?) 8. Ease of monetization (is the market liquid, or does it have a high barrier to entry?) Continue reading this article. About the Author: Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl made his first horrible looking website full of animated .gifs in 1997, and after fours years of failure and experimentation ended up in the world of SEO and internet marketing in early 2001. He is currently an independent marketing consultant from the SEO school of thought. Todd earned a bachelors of business adminstration from Northwood University in 2003 while running an web design and consulting firm Meta4creations, LLC. Todd is a speaker at both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies conferences. |
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