Focus On What Could Be And Not What Is

It still amazes me (ok, probably not actually) that people ask me why I took the time to start a business on a dot me domain name. Why waste the time???

Well, as I have mentioned in past posts, the first thing domain investors need to do when they start to think about building a business is step outside of the inward focused thinking we all do since we are so close to our domain investments. We need to quit thinking about the NAME and more about a business model.

Much like buying the right domain names to resell is about building the correct domain investment model, the same goes when you have an idea for a business based on one of your domain names. No less than three times I have had people say why not just buy the .COM for X amount of dollars.

Come on, seriously, if you are going to start a business and you are not already starting with 10 million bucks in the bank of someone elses money before you have a dime in revenue how smart is it to actually spend hundreds of thousands on a domain name?

I know there are plenty of "dot anything other than .COM haters" out there that are disagreeing, probably never will read this blog again, but oh well. It is the truth. There is a reason you see many companies that have started up not get their .COM domain that they end up spending 100K on until after the fact. That reason is that they would of never even got off the ground if they would of spent that money on the name rather than focusing on their business first.

Do not get me wrong, most people miss the point with the conversation above, the point is not that the name is not valuable, but it is not so valuable that the business should never start just because you do not have the name. It cracks me up when people act like that, and I see it virtually anytime I head to the message boards or make a post about alternative extensions.

I know you are thinking what the heck, why would you say this when you want to sell domain names at a profit. Once again, you miss the point, the point is the name is valuable, they should buy the name at some point. In many cases these whiz bang new companies end up on TechCrunch in a story that XYZ company buys ABC name after getting their B round of funding. How many times have you read stories like that? It has been more than a few times. But if the company had 250K of seed funding does it make sense to spend 100K on a name? NOPE NOT AT ALL.

So, if you are a domain investor and you have a great idea for a business but since you are so close to the domain industry you cannot see what could be but instead are only focused on having to have the .COM before starting you need to step out of the industry for a second and think like so many other people who HAVE started successful businesses without their keyword .COM and get moving.

I will say it one more time, focus on what could be not what is!

Using Search Volume To Select A Domain Name

When I am hand registering a domain name or searching through dropping domains I typically spend a lot of time analyzing search volume based on exact match results from Google. Although this is a good way to look for hidden gems for back order or hand registration there are times that it may be valuable to lower the number of exact searches you may typically search for and reasons it may continue to be something that helps you find a good name for resell to an end user.

We all like to go for the big search volume names because we are hoping for large amounts of traffic from type-ins or hopefully the SEO value we get from having an exact match name. But one thing many people do not realize is that there are certain industries that have quite a bit of competition in the advertiser space, a very limited set of customers, and based on that a very low search volume. But every one of those customers matter. When you have a keyword being searched for 1 million times it may be ok to miss one or two visitors to a competitor but when there are only 100 possible customers per month and the value of the sell can be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, every single search counts.

I recently picked up several names on drop for just this reason, together they form a network of exact match names in a growing and very lucrative industry where customers are limited but value is high. Where I typically try to not go below a certain number of searches per month for exact match names, in this case the PPC value and advertiser competition shows that a network with decent traffic could be an opportunity for a decent sell to a player in this industry, we are talking less than 1000 searches per month total between the names but all of value. I cannot stress that enough.

At the end of the day we all want lots of traffic but really the amount of traffic and the value of each visitor is determined by the industry being targeted. 100 visitors to a site selling 1 dollar items does not mean much, but 100 customers ending up at a site that could be selling 20 thousand dollars items is  a whole different value.

I know this is nothing earth shattering, but sometimes I think we lose perspective of the real value of traffic and why sometimes low search volume does not mean low value.