This might be an article different from any of the articles you’ve read before about domaining.

I’m honored to be able to get this information in front of you, because it regards a decade of strategic planning by one of my clients. Their story is fascinating for true domain investors and online marketers with an international focus.
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I don’t know if the rest of you get this feeling being in the domain business, but many times I consider myself an adventurer circa 15th century sailing across strange oceans searching for new trade routes, cultures and societies to discover.

I have the innate understanding that with new trade can come untold benefits for everyone. This ultimately leads me to clients outside the domain industry with unusual but intriguing ideas of the value of their domains.  Few are feasible, but those that are, amaze me. Any domainer can explore and benefit from these same discoveries.

Six months ago, I came across one of the most exciting clients I ever had the fortune to meet. They showed me domains that rivaled the topics of the biggest domain sales in the world, listing a variety of domain brands and generics that I thought were remarkable. However, I had to spend time analyzing and researching them to understand how to interpret those values because they were in another language.  It didn’t take long to see my client had domains that sat on the fringes of where “normal” high values of domains rested, mainly, romaji .COMs and some of their CO.JP domains (an honor and expensive to own) and some killer IDN’s.

My client has an unusual story to tell, and behind that story lies a large list of very valuable premium domains, many in the .COM version, some in .NET, .JP, a few of the hugely powerful .CO.JP’s and a handful of great IDN’s, including probably the most killer IDN domain available. I didn’t know much about IDN’s, but I knew people who did. The IDN people I talked to were experts, and seem to have a “wait and watch us kickass” kind of attitude, but they were extremely helpful and a hearty bunch. However, my client’s story isn’t just about IDNs.

I don’t think anyone has ever covered this domain area, if so, I will gladly post their links and my apologies for being presumptuous. Normally, by mutual agreement, I keep my clients’ information and their domains to myself, but with their permission, I’m able to post this article so that domainers can decide for themselves whether there will be some major movement in the area of my client’s domain name niches.

I interviewed Glenn Sherman, who is a partner in the company that owns the domains and created the unique strategy to capture their value over a decade ago. (Out of respect and proper business protocol, please contact me directly if you wish to begin a conversation with my client. Thanks!  “email: successclick – at – gmail . com”):

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: Glenn, I want to first thank you for participating in this interview. It’s not something I would normally do, but your domains and investment strategy are powerful products and ideas, and I think it’s something domainers should know. I’m excited about finally revealing some of your domains and informing the domain industry and Japanese marketing directors and companies of the value I believe your domains have.

GLENN SHERMAN: Stephen, thanks for inviting us for the opportunity to educate online investors about these domains, which we’ve worked hard to obtain ten years ago. We believe we have the best Japanese language domain in several extensions available, including the .jp IDN’s. We’ve been excited having you work with us as a consultant help guide us in defining our list of Japanese-oriented domain names.  We have a significant inventory of ‘Romaji’ domains in the .COM space, these being Japanese words transliterated into English-alphabet words, and have some top premium IDN domains both in .COM and .JP.

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: It’s been very interesting in researching the values on your domains, trying to understand the now-outdated Japanese marketing technique of promoting their companies by using “search terms” in their advertisements, instead of a owning a great generic domain name. This was something I wasn’t aware of, and was startled by how illogical this marketing process was, both online and offline. Why promote “search terms” in your advertisements that will ultimately bring up your competitors in the search results, instead of owning the generic descriptive domain name of the search term which can point users straight to your website? This intrigued me, but not enough to ask “why”. Many Japanese companies are quickly moving away from this misguided “strategy”

GLENN SHERMAN: Yes, when we first started investing in these domains, we anticipated that this internet navigation single-mindedness in Japanese internet access would evolve to using more name direction, or typeins, as more commonly known.

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: Some of your domain purchases in these extensions are very expensive, and require serious regulations to follow. This caused your company to invest with a positive “bullish” attitude on their eventual value appreciation. This took a lot of knowledge of the culture and the marketing demographics that would be a part of the evaluation of your domain portfolio. How did this come about for your company?

GLENN SHERMAN: About ten years ago, our company’s Founder, Lance T. Brown, was somewhat curious as to why the domain gold rush was not catching-on in Japan nearly as fast as it was in the USA. At the time, Lance spoke with a considerable number of his relations in Japan, and every one of them told Lance that the Internet was not and will never be too important for “us Japanese”, in that, they all believed that the Internet was more of a trend or a fad, than an important development or an event that would lead to a paradigm-shift in society. Lance tried to convince his relations that domain names were much more than a fad or a trend. His Japanese relations could not be convinced at the time, which was many years ago.

Seeing this lackadaisical attitude about domain names and their importance within the Japanese business community, Lance immediately formed a team consisting of two Americans and two Japanese language experts.  He directed his team to identify the best possible Japanese words representing the highest premium English generic domains to register. These words considered from their Romanized (‘Romaji’) spelling would create simple, clear, memorable and easy to understand URL addresses that would have natural models for important business and social website applications.

Our goal then was to register as many domain names determined to be the most prestigious TLDs for websites as an international phenomenon and on into the future.

Our team developed sophisticated methods to identify specific criteria to select the most desirable Japanese words possible.  To qualify, the words needed to exceed a certain minimum score established and judged on by each member of the team based on the following criteria:

·        The existence of a natural website model following the (domain) name
·        Shortness of the word/domain name
·        Ease of ‘Romanized’ (‘Romaji’) spelling of the word/domain name
·        Ease of memorizing the word/domain name, and the attractiveness of the word/domain name

Within a year our team had identified more than 3,000 generic Japanese words, and were able to find available and register, nearly 1,000 of these words as domain names, creating the largest and best premium domain name collection of Japanese words in the world.

After a time, .JP and so-called ‘Double-Byte’ names became available. We then registered a good number of top quality premium Japanese words on these spaces.  We did this for good measure; to assure a continuing high value for our extensive premium generic Japanese domain name collection.

It was our investment expectation that over the upcoming years, as the domain market and understanding of domain values would grow in popularity and importance in Japan, our premium domain names would greatly increase in value. As we saw this come to pass we knew we would develop website businesses at the same time using the funds from selling our premium Japanese domain names to entrepreneurs that agreed with the amazing opportunities. Being that our intention was to wait some years, until the power of name direction significance in Japan would gain a good degree of usage and acceptance, we simply sat on our domain collection (until being referred to you).

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: What specifically prompted you to move forward in promoting these keyword Japanese domains? Was there a specific milestone that made you decide to say “Now is the time to make our domains known”?

GLENN SHERMAN: In the last two years, we watched the huge increase in interest in our domains after parking them at WhyPark and seeing some IDN’s sell big, plus the expansive move by ICANN to start selling their new extensions. We figured, why buy a new extension when there are still incredible domains in the current extensions, and in a group that really hasn’t been explored yet, which is — non-English premium domains in the .COM extension? After working with you and seeing the results from WhyPark’s buildout of our domains, Lance decided it was time to move forward our plans for the premium Japanese domain name collection. It seems that most of the assumptions Lance made ten years ago about the future of premium domain names in a different language has arrived, with the hugely international demographic between Japanese websites and especially the English speaking market.

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: Why didn’t you create your best domains into successful websites as examples of their value first before offering up your portfolio for sale?

GLENN SHERMAN: We decided to reserve a few of the premium domain names from our collection, which we intend to develop into important and powerful websites in Japan, such as; Dorubako.com [Goldmine!];  Eiyou.com [Nutrition]; Nakagai.com [Broker], and hundreds of others.  As an effort to finance our own premium websites we are taking the step of selling the bulk of our Japanese domain name collection to like-minded investors. Before we get started, any entrepreneur familiar with domain potential on an international level should be interested in our premium Japanese domain name collection.

Premium English-language domain names, such as business.com, hobby.com, flowers.com, etc., have each sold for multiple millions of US Dollars. We are launching desirable Japanese-language domain names included in the collection, such as Shobai.com [Japanese slang equivalent of BIZ.COM],  Onigiri.com [Onigiri is the most common Japanese snack, a rice ball with filling] , Omizu.com [Mizu is "Water". The ‘O’ denotes an honorific such as “grand” or “special”], and hundreds more.

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: It is obvious that a powerful “word” or phrase, even in a non-english .COM, is extremely valuable, especially when the specific market for those domains are now coming up to speed. One of the facts I had to interpret when taking you on as a client was the “.CO.JP” domain extension. From what I’ve learned, only a business located in Japan can own one of these remarkably rare and valuable domains. More compelling is the fact that the .CO.JP extension is limited to only one domain per Japanese company! I don’t think that restriction exists on any other ccTLD in the world. It can literally cost a company outside of Japan tens of thousands of dollars to be able just to register a .CO.JP domain extension. Grabbing a one-word premium with this already rare extension is an extremely powerful position to be in when promoting prodservs by a company. This is the “Shangrila” of domain extensions in Japan. Am I wrong?

GLENN SHERMAN: The extension of .CO.JP is a powerhouse extension because it is one of the few domains extensions that are regulated to giving only one domain to the company that applies for it. That means, there is no company entity that owns more than one .CO.JP domain name. It is a very dominating position to own a .CO.JP domain, and you must have a business located in Japan in order to own one. They are probably the most respected domains in Japan.

Finally, it should be noted that currently it would be impossible or absolutely prohibited by expense to form a comparative premium Japanese domain name collection today to ours. Even one that is 20% of its scope and depth in that all the favorable Japanese words [domain names] have been registered many years ago.  The domains we captured when the Japanese market didn’t understand their value have now come home to roost, so to speak.

STEPHEN DOUGLAS: For me, you embarked on an adventurous strategy, and one I’ve never seen before. Thanks for being open and transparent about your domains and your game plan. Your domain portfolio covers so many incredible variables, this one article doesn’t explain the depth of your many extensions, their buildout market capture, the potential explosion of Japanese/American acceptance of a generic Japanese domain name in the many extensions you control. Let me end my comments by saying “good job, Glenn-San and Lance-San, and your many Japanese experts pushing domains into Japan’s online marketing ideologies.

GLENN SHERMAN: Thanks Stephen for giving us the opportunity to discuss what we see is a new opportunity for domain investors and Japanese end users to consider what we predicted would come to fruition ten years ago.

“Omo arigatou-gozaimasu” (Thank you very much!)

Several of my clients are owners of niche-based domain portfolios. Many of them have secured a large amount (anything over 1000 domains) towards their geo-niche. Some are good domains, some are bad, others are blah. However, their focus isn’t on the domains so much as the purpose of those domains to complete a business site in order to provide a continuing “source or service”.

Many new domainers overlook this simple theory, which is “commanding a domain niche”, and then building out a series of websites, or a specific website that they point all their relevant niche domains back their “Central Hub” site. Some potential moneymakers are hidden in sites like these, especially if you’re picking up a niche category of domains describing mechanical or electronic parts, food items, and “how to” sites. The biggest drawback is development of these sites, with the time and money involved. Additionally, how soon will it be when the public at large looks at name direction as the ultimate way to find the item/service/product they need?

Investing in the keyword generic descriptive domain name of every product/service in your niche can get expensive and almost pointless if you don’t feel that someday, a manufacturer or distribitor of these product/services that has a BNM (Brick N Mortar) presence will pay you handsomely for setting up a perfect conduit to their catalog. This is a choice you have to make. Get advice if you’re unsure about how many or what type of domains to buy to command your domain niche.

As for the cost and time building out a niche site or network, especially in geo-domains, there are an ever-increasing amount of new companies or services being offered to help a niche domain developer, either for minimal costs or sharing the revenue (the latter depends on how strong your domains and niche are in bringing in traffic). I have several niches in which I’m experimenting with, and I think that the overall concept, even in the variety of ways each niche site can achieve profitability, is strong. You can monetize your site with adlinks, affiliate offers (amazon is good), ebooks can be incredibly profitable, especially if you’re an expert in the field, “how to” books, banner ads, and even subscription-based services.

I will discuss these issues in the next few months, and you’ll hear some great advice from some power players involved in successful niche category buildouts and geo-specific buildouts. If you have an experience or detail you’d like to share, we welcome your comments.