Cakalele

Domain Names 101

cakalele — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:46:12 +0000

Why A Premium Domain Name

cakalele — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:20:29 +0000

The difference between a great domain name and other marketing expenses is that you are acquiring a permanent, valuable and potentially resalable brand, which helps future customers define you – as opposed to renting keyword traffic from a search engine.

Owning a more meaningful domain name has become expensive with the average price of a common phrase or saying, ending in the dominant .COM extension, hovering between $9,000 and $30,000. In fact, the collective domain name industry consistently sells an estimated $5-10 million of domains each and every week at prices buyers are more than willing to pay.

Why are Good Domain Names Priced High?

Are they priced high? The debate about why domain names command so much value is never a debate between people who understand the value of them. Those who do not understand the premium value of domain names simply need to brush up on their understanding about the scarcity of the underlying asset and put jealousy aside.

If one were to compare the price of almost anything to its “original” cost we could classify “everything” as expensive. A $3 bottled water costs how much to produce? A $300 pair of designer sunglasses probably cost less than a cup of coffee to manufacture!

Those interested in learning about domain names should start by visiting places like Domaining.com, DNJournal.com, DomainNameWire, theDomains.com or ElliotsBlog.com to understand the very active domain name marketplace which exists and why names which are wrongly perceived to be expensive today, will be cheap at TEN TIMES THE PRICE tomorrow.

No, because real estate has a tangible, and long- standing value in our society. The business of selling land has been around for nearly a millennium. The Internet is merely 15 years old. Domain names are certainly property in the online context, and many generic names are owned by astute investors who saw the future value of these properties long before it was popular to poke, tweet or surf. Just like traditional real estate, these individuals should be recognized as smart people who were in the right place at the right time.

Unless you have a registered trademark on a particular name or someone is intentionally capitalizing on a typographical variant of your registered trademark, no one is really “squatting” on a domain name. Everyone pays for the privilege of occupying their name via renewal fees. Those who wrongly complain that “some nefarious party is squatting on their name,” without a trademark, are equivalent to telling grandmother that her foresight in purchasing that beach acreage makes her an evil natured women rather than a smart investor. Real estate ownership is accepted by public opinion and so should domain-name investing be.There are good and bad apples in every field. No one can deny that certain domain registrants engage in the monetization of trademark intent names. Every legitimate industry contains problem actors. The jewelry business, used car market, financial companies and pretty much every industry you can name has their share of reputable dealers and non- reputable ones. The trick is finding trustworthy sellers who deal with assets which are fairly valued.

How Much is a Domain Name Worth?

A domain name is worth what anyone is willing to spend. Sales routinely go unreported in the millions of dollars, however most domain name re-sales occur between $5,000 to $80,000 Premium domains, category-killer domains and short-meaningful names frequently command “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions” of dollars, depend- ing on a wide range of parameters. Look past the broad value spectrum and consider how a single $10,000 domain name’s cost compares to the value proposition of traditional media.

Had you spent $10,000 on a meaningful and generic domain name your only future expenses are just $8 per year in registration renewal fees – less than $1 a month. And that name would continue to deliver a din-level stream of type-in visitors until such time as you were ready to develop or resell it! resell was frequently the domain name of the company which failed!

There are other nominal expenses related to developing domain names, but all of those expenses are merely “investments” which go directly toward building brand value into something you already OWN – not airtime or billboard space you lease!

Then you have the intangible elements such as the brand-authority domain names command, that traditional media cannot aspire to. Imagine owning a domain like testdrive.com or crosswordpuzzles.com – Domains like these are intuitive and descriptive. They define your role as a leader relating to the subject which the name describes and the cost is a rounding error in comparison to traditional brand advertising. Many .COM domains have even proven they can command $1,000,000 or more – even at a fire sale.

After the last dot com bust the only asset left to resell was frequently the domain name of the company which failed!

The quantity of meaningful compound-word names, while remarkably limited, is wrongly perceived to be plentiful. Despite this, most names routinely sell at a take-away cost well below annual rental costs of a single type of traditional advertising (radio, newspaper and the like).

The real question is not how much a domain name costs but how much value the right domain name can bring to your business. Take a look at your marketing budget and see what $10,000 buys you. Not a whole lot – well, you can own and resell a generic .com name-brand forever for that cost.

Courtesy of DomainNameSales.com

Benefits of Generic Domains

cakalele — Mon, 30 May 2011 01:03:54 +0000

Instant credibility and respect. Let potential clients instantly know that you’re serious about what you’re doing.
Easy to remember. They might forget some brands but always remember the products/services name, example Books.com, Loans.com
Stand out of the crowd, branding and marketing as the market leader.
Drives targeted traffic to your web site based on keyword searches relating to your brand identity, products and/or services.
Takes traffic away from competing web sites that are only using a domain name based on a company name or vanity name, not keywords used by potential visitors searching for your products or services.
Attract type-in traffics (web site traffic that has come directly from users typing into their browser’s address bar).
Dominate search engines, web sites with keyword-rich domains have better chances of being listed at top positions in search engine results.
Investment value, high quality generic domains have huge upside potential.
Drive hundreds or thousands of potential new clients to a company’s website on a daily basis, at no additional cost via search engines / type-ins

Many large companies have already purchased generic domains, because they want to benefit from owning a premium .com domain name:

Adobe – Director.com, Flash.com
Amazon – Endless.com
American Express – Open.com
AOL – Games.com
AT&T – Mobile.com, WebHosting.com
Bank of America – Loans.com
Barnes and Noble – Book.com, Books.com
Bayer – Aspirin.com, MultipleSclerosis.com
Burlington Coat Factory – Coat.com
Citibank – Finance.com, Mortgage.com, StudentLoan.com
CNET – Download.com, Help.com, News.com, TV.com
CNN/Time Inc. – Money.com, Mutual-Funds.com
Corel – Designer.com
Daimler AG – TruckStore.com
Dell – CloudComputing.com
Disney – Family.com, Kid.com
ESS Data Recovery – DataRecovery.com
Fandango – Movie.com, Movies.com
Fidelity – 401k.com, Funds.com
G&J Holdings – Candy.com
General Electric – AutoLeasing.com
Google – Android.com, Hello.com
Health Magazine/Time Inc. – Health.com
History Channel – History.com
Honda – Motorcycles.com
HRS – Hotel-Reservation.com
Intel – Chips.com
Intuit – Banking.com, Payroll.com
JC Penny – Gift.com
Johnson and Johnson – Baby.com, Cancer.com
K-Swiss – TennisShoes.com
Microsoft – Docs.com, GPS.com, Investor.com, Juice.com, Office.com, Start.com, TV.net
Monster – Jobs.com
Office Depot – OfficeSupplies.com, School.com
Oracle – Retail.com, Sales.com, Think.com
Philips – SemiConductors.com, Speech.com
Procter and Gamble – DentalCare.com, Nails.com, Tissue.com, Toothpaste.com
Ralph Lauren – Polo.com, Rugby.com
Société Générale – Warrants.com
Sun Microsystems – Network.com, ServiceProvider.com
T-Mobile – Aerial.com
Toys-R-Us – Toys.com
Travelocity – Vacations.com
Weather Channel – Weather.com
Wedding Channel – Weddings.com
Wells Fargo – Strong.com
Xerox – ColorPrinters.com, Documents.com
Zappos – Clothes.com

Drives targeted traffic to your web site based on keyword searches relating to your brand identity, products and/or services.

Importance Of A Domain Name

cakalele — Mon, 30 May 2011 00:09:35 +0000

On the World Wide Web your domain name is your own unique identity. No two parties can ever hold the same domain name simultaneously; therefore your Internet identity is totally unique. If you have a business site on the Internet your domain name is your own online brand and in a sense you can use your domain name as your online business card. With your own domain name your web site, and e-mail addresses for example will have that professional look, being unique to your business. Many people often miss the importance of having and then keeping their domain name until they lose it. Once this happens they soon realize that they have lost their whole online identity. How does a domain name work?

To understand why you need a domain name you first need to know how a domain name works.

A domain name is an addressing construct, used for finding and identifying computers on the Internet. Computers use Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses, which are a series of numbers used to identify each other on the Internet; however, many people find it hard to remember IP Addresses. Because of this, domain names were developed so that easily remembered names and phrases could be used to identify entities in the Internet instead of using an IP Address.

For example, the domain name M6.net identifies the company M6.net. When a user types the domain name M6.net in their browser or sends an email to M6.net, the Domain Name System (DNS) will translate the domain name into IP numbers. These are then used by the Internet to connect the user to M6.net’s web presence.

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What is domain name?

cakalele — Sun, 29 May 2011 00:12:20 +0000

A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are hostnames that identify Internet Protocol (IP) resources such as web sites. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS).

Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. They are organized in subordinate levels (subdomains) of the DNS root domain, which is nameless. The first-level set of domain names are the top-level domains (TLDs), including the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as the prominent domains com, net and org, and the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Below these top-level domains in the DNS hierarchy are the second-level and third-level domain names that are typically open for reservation by end-users that wish to connect local area networks to the Internet, run web sites, or create other publicly accessible Internet resources. The registration of these domain names is usually administered by domain name registrars who sell their services to the public.

Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, or hostnames. Hostnames are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as a component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as web sites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org).

Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of a resource. Such examples are the realm identifiers used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the DomainKeys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

An important purpose of domain names is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet. Such a move usually requires changing the IP address of a resource and the corresponding translation of this IP address to and from its domain name.

Domain names are often referred to simply as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners, although domain name registration with a registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the top-level development and architecture of the Internet domain name space. It authorizes domain name registrars, through which domain names may be registered and reassigned. The use of domain names in commerce may subject strings in them to trademark law. In 2010, the number of active domains reached 196 million according to Verisign report.

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