Over 200 Million Registered Domains
With over 200 million registered domains, a recent review has found that roughly 10% are generic .com domains. That is 20 million good generic domains with the TLD (Top Level Domain) of .com.
With 500 million businesses in the world, there is a shortage of .com’s to go around. Using any other TLD, like .cc, .net, .tv, .us or .info, drives business every time to the .com.
This means a great generic .com domain is a valuable commodity. A great generic domain does not contain a geographic limitor, such as HoustonDesigner.com. Although a great domain for the Houston area, the best generic would be Designer.com.
Geographic limiting domains are still valuable. Their value is approximately 1/200th of it’s generic primary. Example: HoustonJOBS.com is a valuable domain because of the business and income behind it, but Jobs.com is far more valuable because of it’s global reach.
Some good sites to search for these domains is Snapnames.com, NameJet.com and Godaddy.com. Often times people forget to renew domains and, when they expire, these services pick them up and auction them off. I have picked up some great domains this way.
Total Market Domination Approach to Domain Acquisition
When I first started buying domain names, I got some great advise from some friends in the business to not only look for a great generic name but to buy everything I could find that a competitor in the same genre could use to gain market share.
Example: I bought HoustonJOBS.com. I also bought the .net, .org, .cc, .tv and .mobi. I also purchased every combination of “Houston” and “jobs” I could find and afford. Why? So I would not have to compete against someone else with almost as good a name.
Another example: I bought HoustonRestaurants.com and HoustonsRestaurants.com. Then I bought HoustonCuisine.com, HoustonFood.com and HoustonDiner.com. I finally ended up with over 30+ domains that I could use independently and link back to HoustonRestaurants.com with legitimate links.
This is not a link farm in that each domain is an actual site with a little different slant addressing the same issues. Essentially, owning the competition.