Domaining.org.uk

I thought now would be a good time to highlight a few of the most interesting posts that I have seen over the past month…………..

Perhaps the most important event this month was ICANN’s decison to relax the rules about naming domain name extensions. Now anyone with enough cash can buy their own domain extension. So we could easily see new top level domains like .sex, .london and .eBay. Is this a disaster waiting to happen or will this open up the pool of available domains. See what expert domainer Elliot Silver has to say on this development  and see what other people are saying about ICANN’s decision in this post on TheDomains.com blog.  

Meanwhile, the Self Made Minds blog has a post that offers some tips for domainers thinking of leasing rather than selling their domains. Once you have read this, read this post about domain leasing agreements and then look at leaseadomain.co.uk/. This is all very early in the development of this market, and I would recommend that you get yourself a good lawyer before taking the plunge in this highly speculative area. This is one area novice domainers should avoid completely.

Next, here is a short introduction in how to use the Wordpress blogging platform to build sites that actually look like sites, rather than blogs. This will be especially useful for domainers who want to develop domains into minisites, for example.

Many domainers are taking their best domains and developing them into fully fledged websites. These new internet entrepreneurs have learned how they can make a decent income by either selling their domain with its established website for good money or by developing their domains and enjoying good regular incomes. I like reading about successful internet entrepreneurs and this article How I Built A Six Figure Internet Income about the income potential of blogs, from the Financial Hack blog, is quite inspiring.

Finally, this post about domain name appraisals on the Domain Junkie blog is well worth reading. It compares domain name appraisals from Moniker and Sedo and recommends obtaining appraisals from two trusted sources before negotiating a price for a domain.

Lets imagine, for a moment, that you are a bricks and mortar retailer selling classic car spare parts in London, England and you want to set up a website. The chances of you finding even a remotely generic domain name at a reasonable price is negligible. So you decide to go with something like DavesCarSpareParts.com. Its not a great domain, but it is descriptive.

Once your site is up and running you look at how to market your website. The name you have chosen is the best you could find, and you may even be able to rank well when people type in ‘Daves Car Spare Parts’ into the Google search box, but few people type this in, anyway. What is worse its hard to say over the telephone and its not that easy to remember.

So if you cannot get a reasonably generic domain for your business, what can you do?

The problem is one that many, many businesses face and there is a trend developing that may have serious implications for domain names and domaining.

According to trend monitoring website  The Trendwatch, the solution Japanese businesses in this situation are starting to adopt is interesting, to say the least.  There is an emerging trend for Japanese businesses to optimize their sites for specific keywords and promoting the keywords people should use to search for their business in advertising, as well as the site URL:-

It turns out that search boxes seem to be the latest thing in advertising all over the little island, and have been for the past few months. Not only do they list the URL, but they also place a search box in the ad, with the keywords already placed.

So the business in our example just needs to pick some memorable keywords and encourage people to search on these words such as ‘car spares’, ‘a1 parts’ or even ‘Daves spares’.

I think that trends like this pose a significant threat to the value of generic domains. If its going to cost me $2,600,000 for a domain like Pizza.com but I can rank no 1 in Google for ‘love pizza’ at a fraction of that price annually, then I am going to at least consider the cheaper option. Furthermore, for many businesses this might be their only option. Keywords are back but this time its serious.