Well, it’s been just about 3 months since I purchased my first 56 domains as investments. Since that time I’ve read a lot of other blogs and got a feel for what the seasoned domainers have been doing to make money in this business. What I’ve come to realize is that in the beginning domaining was all about buying a “keyword” or “keywords”, parking the landing pages with a PPC company, and watching the money roll in as internet users typed in what they were looking for and added dot com to the end. Bingo!… they found there new pair of shoes.
Early domainers got rich off of one word domains like shoes.com (and still are) but in my humble opinion those days are fading into history. Sure, Shoes.com will always make money unless technology takes us to a place where our feet don’t touch the ground but that’s something for the Jetsons.
The reason I decided to write this post is because I get these “expired lists” everyday and when I scan through them I shake my head because those who registered the names listed were hoping to turn a profit based on the principals of the early days of domaining - i.e., buy two words that make no sense when sounded together but make money because the search engines would return results with either of the words in the domains. Don’t get me wrong. I would have loved to have been into this business early on and made money on names that just don’t make good sense grammatically but make money because they contain two words that might make up a sentence like smellnose.com or energydung.com.
Those of us who are getting into this business now don’t have much to choose from in the “never registered before” category but that’s where my money goes for the time being. I’m not in the position to pay big bucks for “keyword domains” that will only make money as a parked domain and no sense to anyone for anything else. I think the days of parking are numbered and I’m in the process of providing my visitors with something novel like what they’re actually looking for. Most of my domains are two and three word phrases that make sense when said together. They’re catchy and most of all memorable. I hate parked pages and internet users do too!