DOMAINS SET THE COURSE OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS SUCCESS
May 26th, 2008 Posted in Aftermarket, General Domain News, Parking Services
The domain name industry, believe it or not, is less than eight years old. It depends on how you look at it, but doesn’t it seem like we’ve all been doing this a lot longer than eight years? Lot’s of changes in the industry have occurred in the last few years, but the tidal wave was started by Rick Schwartz with TRAFFIC, Frank Schilling and Dr. Kevin Ham’s astounding success stories, Andrew Miller and Zappy’s buildout juggernaut of Chocolate.com, and the sledge-hammer domain control of (the fore-mentioned pioneers), IREIT and other domain conglomerates like Name Media and Demand Media. These visionaries opened up the floodgates for domainers, and we all jumped into our rubber rafts to run the rapids to try to make it to the party at the Big Bucks Lagoon at the end of the run. Will we make it there, or end up squealing like Ned Beatty in “Deliverance”?
The root of our intent is fairly clear: teach the end-user the value of owning the generic descriptive domains for their products/services (prodservs). No domain investor will argue against this.
The destiny for domain names aren’t about parking them, that’s only a stop-gap revenue generator while we wait for a smart, financially-capable company to make the right offer to purchase the domain that defines their company and its products. It isn’t just the domain’s worth at that moment, but for what the domain’s value will be far into the future. A killer $1 million domain can create massive profits for a company for years beyond their initial investment. In fact, even a small niche domain for $1,000 can help a small company capture their online market in the same way. Even beyond that, a good domain name is a constantly rising value. The more the company defines the domain and their website with their products, the more the domain’s value appreciates. (Appreciable Marketing Asset - AMA)
This question is addressed to the business sector: What is your company’s domain doing for you right now? Does it tell your market what your company is all about? Does it direct internet users to your site when they’re looking for your products/services? Is your domain name (website URL) remembered when potential customers see it in your advertisements?
If you step back from your company, and look at it from a generic standpoint, how do you define your prodservs? Do you control the name direction usage of potential customers? If not, what’s holding you up in building a large portfolio of generic descriptive domains (GDD’s) that you can point to your company’s website when your potential customers type in your generic prodserv phrases? HINT: Do you have a high-powered ad agency who steers you to buy domain names that match their ad campaigns instead of educating you on the fact that category-killing generic descriptive domains on your prodservs can bring you hundreds of thousands of eyeballs to your company in a year, every second of the day, and at a fraction of the cost that the ad agency is charging you for their ad campaigns?
It’s hard to gauge the “knowledge” of marketing directors of companies, or whoever is in charge of advertising and marketing at smaller companies. Although there have been a lot of articles written on domain names and their value in topnotch publications such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN.money, Business 2.0, and hundreds of newspapers and other media sources, we domain investors really don’t have an idea on how the people at any company in charge of selling the company’s prodservs online understand domain values.
It’s to the advantage of every domain investor to push these types of questions into the mainstream media. It’s to every domain investors’ advantage to find out how educated every business is about domain names and their pinnacle value over every type of marketing their company engages in. Ultimately, the real advantage goes to every businessman who learns and experiences the value that domain names bring to their company. If this happens, will there be a gold rush on domain names?
Only if the we tell the world where the gold is.
One Response to “DOMAINS SET THE COURSE OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS SUCCESS”
By Kelly Lieberman on May 26, 2008
Excellent post. I think that even alot of web development companies are steering their clients to basic SEO and SEM -leaving out the whole issue of domain assets- because they don’t have any idea how they are going to get their chunk of that pie or how they will monetize it initially.
They know how much money they can bring in selling SEO which is a continuous monthly income stream. What would happen if their client bought farmsilo.com and had 500 interested eyeballs coming in a day that they had nothing to do with the SEO? Do they fear losing their income stream??
Of course, if they think of the big picture they would see that they would be selling more server space, designing more websites,hosting more accounts adding additional bells and whistles too help the client handle the huge influx of orders.. but I am not sure anyone is “thinking”.
I agree that it is to our advantage to educate every end user about domains, let’s also educate all those middle-men between us and them!
There are alot of local networking meetings, Chamber of Commerce events, tradeshows,and the like that are always in need of speakers. I think that we should start volunteering to speak at the events that might make sense in our communities. I have already talked to a few business writers for some local business magazines about domains and I am waiting to hear back from them.
Good luck to everyone on their efforts. It will take all of us doing our share.
++++STEPHEN DOUGLAS SEZ+++++
Excellent ideas, Kelly. I think volunteering to speak at local business meetings, contacting industry periodicals and offering to write a free article on domain value to a business (also could be looked at as “promotional speaking” for your business too!) are great ideas. Additionally, I suggest everyone get google news alerts on “domain name”, “website marketing” and “marketing news” to see all the articles coming out, and spend a half our each day sending in comments to the articles, or talking on their forums. If we domainers branch out into the business sector, starting with the marketing industry, and discuss the incredible advantages of domains to a business presence online, the amount of people being educated about domains could increase exponentially. Good comment, thanks!