Domain Names - Investments That Pay Dividends (Part 1)
July 29, 2008
When people first hear about domain investing, even experienced marketers, they often cringe. Some think it means buying trademark and typo terms to get “accidental” visitors looking for a different site. Some believe domains have little monetary value, and are instead traded on intrinsic characteristics like “cuteness” or scarcity.
The importance played on domain names has never been very high as most people including myself thought that for example that PokkyBoy.Ws was as good as Property.Com if they both had identical content. I have recently discovered that this is just a myth and I will start to reveal all with just a few questions on the subject. Firstly Would you consider Google.com or Cellphones.com to be the the most valuable domain name, but strictly on a valuation basis?
Even my dog has just answered Google.com so don’t feel so bad when I tell you that it isn’t the case here and I will explain just why. I think we would all agree that Google is one of the most successful businesses there are on or off line, but how many people do you think put Google in the search box… exactly, it is not often used as a keyword. What this is really telling us is that if you own a domain name you also control the keyboard.
The domain name Google.com is one of the short names that sound cool and easy to remember and I too have several similar type domain names. They only receive minimum traffic as they are not proper words that people would use to find something and the same would have applied to Google. This type of domain name investment could cost millions of dollars in branding costs, otherwise it would only earn a couple of bucks a year through click revenue and at auction would only sell for about 2000 dollars.
But what if you owned CellPhones.com? How many visitors would you get then, and what might they be looking for? Welcome to the wonderful world of type-in traffic, also known as direct navigation. Based on established type-in click-through metrics for the domain industry, and my own personal experience, a domain like CellPhones.com probably gets between 3000 and 5000 type-in visitors a day or about 125,000 visitors a month. (Find out more in part 2)…coming soon.
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