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Home / Features & Articles / iWorld by Sharad Agarwal

iWorld by Sharad Agarwal

Case for Multiple Domains Ownership

Domain investing could be a good alternative investment option

As the global financial markets slide, and with Wall Street and other world stocks markets plunging, where should people place their money in these uncertain times? Real estate, not likely, unless you have some great leads on foreclosures and bank owned properties. But even these real estate investments will require some financial maneuvering.

Cyber real estate seems like a safer bet, and domain sales are still achieving substantial sales. You can search over 11.5 million domains for Sale at Sedo.com and some 3 million domains at Afternic.com.

GEO domains and key premium words (i.e.) generics should be excellent investments, especially as companies opt for web and mobile advertising over print and TV advertising. Purchasing a premium GEO dotcom or high premium dotcom will cost at least high five figures USD, and more than likely, at least six figures. These could be excellent investments, but they will require deep pockets.

The new .ME TLD (Top-level Domain) is the country domain of Montenegro but the appeal of a .ME extension is one of the most exciting extensions released and .ME is expected to be utilized as both a personalized Web address and as a catchy business marketing tool around the world not least in the Middle East where the relevance is even more apparent.

Launched this July with world record sales, .ME also reached record sales at the two most recent auctions. And the buyers are building .ME sites by the thousands each day. At last count, there were over 1,2600,000 .Me sites, which is staggering for an extension this young.

Apple owns mobileme.com, as well as ME.com, which it bought for an undisclosed amount, and it registered several of its products with the .ME extension. Other large companies, including Google, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, most media companies and leading blogs registered their .ME names.

The most valuable domain is a single word domain describing your specific industry or product with a high number of references and searches.

It is important that the word is a generic dictionary word and that it does not conflict with any trademarks. As an example let us look at SPA.ME. It is a generic 3 letter dictionary word with no trademark conflict and if we have a look at the popularity of the word there are some 844,000,000 references in Yahoo for the word and Google Keyword Tool reveals that some 301,000 search for the exact word "spa" is made every month on Google alone and more than 16 million searches are made every month with the word "spa" in it.

The reason these numbers are important is that it shows how popular the industry is and it is obviously a lot easier to get a single word domain to rank high in search engines. A single word domain allows you to stand out as an authority in your industry and is very valuable for marketing in traditional media as well as online.

When positioning your business online it is important to have as many drivers of traffic as possible and using premium domains will further enhance your position by being able to target a very specific segment or industry.

So how do you go about selecting the appropriate premium domains for your business: Here is the Valuation Metrics:

Domain name length
Number of syllables, readability
Term frequency
Keyword search popularity
Domain extension

You can use multiple domain names to reach the same web site (think of the additional domain names as extra ‘pointers’ to the site). This can be useful in certain circumstances; for example: if your domain name is relatively hard to spell and you also own popular misspellings ("myinsurance.com" and "myinsurence.com"), or if you have registered your domain name both with and without hyphens ("my-domain.com" and "mydomain.com").

Operating multiple sites using numerous domains is a great strategy for businesses appealing to a wide range of customers. Multiple domains can increase search engine visibility, conversions, and brand recognition. But this approach may trigger search engine spam penalties, if you're not careful with implementation. Have a professional web domain strategist advise you on the implementation of your multiple domains strategy.