Buying and selling domain names or ‘Domaining’ as it’s known is nothing new.
It’s been part and parcel of the internet since the beginning. But until recently it was steeped in mystery for me and not something I’ve thought relevant to running a business.
But is there actually something that business owners and marketers can learn from the often weird and wonderful and sometime astoundingly normal (me!) people who buy and sell domains professionally?
Well, quite simply, the answer is a resounding yes!
As business owners and marketers, we spend a great deal of time thinking about how we can market and sell our products and services and this can sometimes lead to a tendency for tunnel vision whereby we focus solely on telling people about our main website and driving people directly to this.
However, by ‘niching’ down our core business into its component parts we can then target those individually. For example, if your core business is SEO, you can break that down into email marketing, Link building, PPC, article writing etc.
And this is where the domain bit comes in because from here it’s possible and highly effective to generate targeted traffic from multiple domains that relate to the niche parts of our core business.
So, rather then just owning and directing your customers to your main company website you may also like to add additional supporting websites that focus on a niche of your core business eg Email Marketing. So you could also have www.Email-Marketing-Advice.org to drive email leads to your main site as well as a number of other similar supporting websites for your other niches.
To choose an effective domain you first need to do some research. There are many tools to do this but the free one is Google Keyword Research tool http://bit.ly/8r2NJ .
You should look for 1 – 4 word phrases that are buying phrases that make sense. “Buy Email Broadcast Software” is good, “Email Buy Broadcast Software” isn’t. A good phrase is much more likely to bring you quality leads.
And by selecting an exact match keyword as your domain, ie a domain that contains the keyword exactly as it showed up in Google’s keyword tool, you have a much better chance of ranking for that keyword, even if you don’t have your site nearly as well optimised as the competing sites in the top ten.
We have proved this to work time and again, along with countless other examples. Just take a look around yourself to see how effective exact match keyword domains are at achieving top ten rankings in Google.
The trick is to identify a keyword phrase that has limited competition and as much traffic as possible. I would recommend at least 30,000 searches a month from your country and less then 100,000 competing websites for the phrase match.
A phrase match is where you add speech marks ” ” to either side of the phrase you are searching for in Google. This will only show you sites where that exact phrase is used eg “Buy Email Broadcast Software” compared to Software Broadcast Email.
To identify how much competition there is for this keyword just type in the phrase match keyword into Google and see how many sites show up.
Once you have identified a good domain that is available using tools from GoDaddy or similar, from here you can easily create WordPress blogs or a simple website that looks smart and professional.
I would also recommend only using .Com, .Org, .Net or your country domain eg .co.uk as these hold the most authority with Google and are the most trusted by your customers in general.
Add unique content and or products that fit within that niche of your business and you have a living, breathing, fully working website that has a great chance of ranking in the top ten of Google with a bit of simple optimisation. This will then send you targeted, hot leads.
If you build a blog around the keyword you also get the added bonus of fresh content which Google loves, and, when well optimised, will help your new site rank better in Google.
The really great thing about this approach is that you can quickly compete against very large businesses who have a far greater marketing budget then you in some very competitive areas.
So, ‘Domaining’ is not just reserved for internet geeks who sit in dark rooms and only come out late at night, it can actually help your business generate targeted, hot leads quickly and cost effectively. That can’t be bad can it?