Master of My Domaining: 10 Things I've Learned About Domaining Since I Jumped Into The Pool	2.8/5.0 (6 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Brian Provost August 25, 2008

It’s been a little over nine months since I started the SEO - Domainer Lovefest (if you think you preceded me, you can take credit for it on your own blog!) and John Andrews left me a comment the other day asking for a SITREP on my escapades. The following is a brain dump of what I’ve learned over the last year or so of taking domaining seriously.

In no particular order…

1.  .com FTW!

If you ever plan on selling a domain name, either developed or undeveloped, the value of a .com is almost always worth the investment premium. For over a decade, .com has been so heavily branded that it’s the first thing in people’s minds and it can support its own economy of type-in traffic that has made many, many domain name investors rich.  .Net’s and .Org’s seem to be selling for 15% of a .com…at best.
2.  .net or .org DOES = .com for SEO’s

If you are not primarily concerned with managing the exit strategy of your web asset, an exact match .net or .org is a great way to develop virtual real estate in very competitive search queries.  Point a couple trusted links at widget.org and you’ve got yourself a widget audience coming from the search engines.
3.  Exact Match Domain Names are Uber Defensible

Audience defensibility (aka, “Defensible Traffic“) is something I take very seriously. There are a million ways for you to get bumped out of your SERP by a competitor, but [exactmatch].com/.net/.org is your version of The Alamo. Just ask Zillow…

4.  An Audience is Harder To Develop Than A Brand, So Go Generic

If you are going to start a new business or launch an external campaign, do everything you can to buy the best, most appropriate premium domain name. Trust me, if you want to sell widgets or be in a widget service industry, widget.com is going to be a strategic asset and competitive advantage.

Widgetizzle.com might sound more brandable, but I’d rather have a lower cost of traffic, more defensibility of my audience, and the other 7,600 audience building advantages of a premium generic domain name than have to leverage off “brand equity” and the 18 dudes who use my site.

5.  Unlike Fantasy Football Running Backs, All The Good Ones AREN’T Taken

Most people think that it’s impossible to find and register a virgin premium domain name. Wrong!

Since you’ve read this far, I’ll share one of my fishing spots for you. I know I’m not the only one fishing there, but it hasn’t yet been super-automated by too many guys, so you can mine it. Track all the new Wikipedia pages that are being generated. There’s a thousand pounds of shit to sift through, but you will find emerging topics that haven’t had their premium.com registered yet.Thank me later.

All that said, virgin domain name registrations may only make up 5% of my portfolio.  It’s definitely not the path of least resistance, but you should always try to get the jump where you can. 

6.  “The Drop”

This was a very powerful technique for domainers older than myself, but it’s still pretty useful in securing premium generics. The real problem here is that it seems the Registrars are holding back as much of the Expiring/Deleting inventory from dropping and stocking their own reserves with these names. That’s ok, though. I see still see a handful or so a week that I will buy as investments or to develop. Snapnames has consistently crushed Pool for me, as far as services go.

7.  Three-word Generics

One-word generic domain names are very valuable, very liquid investments trading in the six- and seven-figure ranges. Two-word generics are the easiest five-figures you’ve ever made. But three-word generics are the new black. This is where I’m killing it right now and I have a strategy in place where I’m buying most of these names…names that mean the world to a liquid market of buyers…for less than $250/each. I’ll tell you about it in a few years after I go Yun Ye on this portfolio…

8.  The SEO/Domainer’s Dilemma: Development vs. Investment

As SEO’s, we know how to make a metric sh*tload of money per domain. Yet we don’t have enough production bandwidth to really scale all that talent. Domainers rarely make much money at all per domain, but they can scale into the hundreds of thousands of domains quite quickly.

My portfolio strategy on my domain names is a hybrid approach. With about a thousand or so names under management, I put them into four asset classes: “the bank”, development, domaining, Free Agents.

“The Bank” is the class of my Untouchables. These are the premium class domains I own and I plan on developing them into large media assets or selling them for a stupid number.

The Development class are premium generics that represent liquid market places of buyers and sellers, but they aren’t true premiums. These are generally two- and three-word names.

The Domaining class mimics your classic domainer model of lots and lots of domain names that somebody might type in and I monetize them via CPC ad inventory. If these ever show any real semblance of traffic, they likely get bumped up a level (or two) into development.

The “Free Agents” are names I actively trade.  See the next point.

9.  Moneyball 

There is a ton of money in buying & selling existing domain names.  So, for those of you with little to no audience development skill, there is still a very strong channel (and getting stronger by the day) in domain name revenue.

As in the stock market, you don’t always have to buy GOOG at $80 and ride it to $550. You could have waited and bought it at $275 and still doubled your jack. There is so much asymmetry in domain name buying & selling that there’s real money in riding “the last doubling”.

While you may be kicking yourself for not being the original $6.95 registrant of a domain name, if you can sell it for $5000 and you can buy it for $500 from the first guy, that adds up to real money!

As a real life example of this, I’ll share what is a great and equally-painful story for me.  Many of you know I recently sold funeralarrangements.com at the Domain Roundtable auction in Seattle.  That was an f’ing great domain name.  It met all of my requirements for development, but I wanted to see how far I could take something I bought on a drop.  I bought it for a few hundred bucks after it dropped on Pool and sold it for $9500 a few months later at the auction.  I think the buyer got a smokin’ deal!  In retrospect, as a more seasoned domainer, I’d probably have moved that from my Free Agent squad into Development had I been able to find an easier business development path for the industry.

10.  SEO + Premium Domains FTMFW

SEO’s and Domainers aren’t called the Internet Dollar Divas for no reason.  You combine the elements of real estate pioneering and industrial real estate development and you get a toxic audience cocktail that just keeps printin’ and printin’ money.

So, that’s it.  Over the last year I’ve invested in or advised the purchases of over $2 million in domain names.  It’s absolutely killed the returns of anything else I could have invested in short of a winning MegaMillions ticket.  I’ll keep on buying more, but if I didn’t have the ability to develop these things, admittedly, I’d still be nervous as hell about sitting back and praying for type-in traffic. The way I see it now, even if the bottom falls out of classical domaining, I’ll use them for their development advantages.  You know…being an SEO again!
PS.  This post is dedicated to Rich McIver. 

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