I’m a wannabe domainer.  I have a nice little portfolio that’s maybe worth six figures, but nothing like the big boys and their hundreds of thousands of premium type-in .com domain names worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  I look at their portfolios and I’m truly amazed by their cost of traffic and reach.  If I knew what I know now back in college, I’d be able to buy Google tomorrow and spam from the inside.  But I digress….

Between myself, the day job, and my client roster, I see virtual real estate development across 100 or so very competitive internet markets.  In these markets, let’s assume the traffic source mix is 5% type-in, 15% other direct nav, 60% search engine referrals, and 20% from external referrers (links).  That’s me being generous on the type-in side, where we own truly premium domain names.  Even with the greatest of the light-touch domain monetization strategies, none of these sites is going to buy me a Carrera GT on the paltry CPC income, but a few crank out a couple mill or more in revenue each year.

My strategy for .com domain names has generally been to stash them away and forget they exist.  I’ll take my SEO skillset and go develop the .org or .net cousins to build the exact same audience thanks to the overweighting of exact match in search engines, leaving the .com domains in the vault to appreciate.  Doing this, I get the best of both worlds.  I get the defensible virtual media asset to rank and acquire a cheap search-driven audience…plus I can participate in the domain name appreciation of the .com. 

To those of us without easy-money, cash-flowing domain portfolios of millions of daily visitors, the actual value of a .com in garnering traffic is not worth the 300% price multiple over a .net or .org exact match domain.  There is no shame in actual audience development if you’ve got the game to do it.  I mean…wedding.com must be making great jack, but a crappy domain name like theknot.com has a market cap of $700 million and weddingchanel.com outranks them all.

For example, if you want to rank a site for [las vegas real estate], lasvegasrealestate.com would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Or you could go get .net or .org for under $25,000.  Google will rank .com, .net, and .org for the exact match phrase just about the same.  So, instead of being the fresh new rapper on MTV Cribs in his Bentley, you can roll like Chris Rock in an Altima with $250,000 in the trunk (not that I would ever drive an Altima….).  You can do a lot of audience development with all that money you saved and it’ll be 99.9% as defensible. 

Go forth, let exact-match be the SEO equivalent of .com type-in, and stockpile those .com type-in domains for those who can’t build an audience cheaply.  It’s the best of both worlds and there’s no shortage of .org’s or .net’s to buy on the cheap.

PS.  Yes, I know the branding value of .com but an audience can be developed without a brand.  A brand cannot be developed without an audience.  You figure out what that premium is worth.

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