Joel

This post is one of the best I have read about this topic.

Also the comments! Absolutely great!

Regards

Duane

Great insights! Thank you for sharing.

Hello!! from a fellow Canadian, btw.

- Richard

Great post – Your right about what is a domainer?

Trying to explain this is so difficult!

We all need to have Elevator Speeches which define what we do!

Regards,

Robbie

If you are “domaining” for a living, then you are a “domainer”.

A “domainer” is someone who invests in domain names in order to monetize them in a variety of ways, and does it as their main source of income. If someone is just buying/selling domains as a side job, they are called “domain investors”.

It’s true, PPC is sucking bigtime, but that doesn’t mean most of the domainers are scheduled for the guillotine. In reality, most of all domainers’ had the “80/20″ rule in effect, meaning, 20% of their domains financed the other 80% that were making nothing.

With the advent of several content development companies such as AEIOU, EVO LANDING, and WHYPARK, domainers now have to become “smart businessmen” and invest some money in creating a real piece of online property for their PPC non-performers. People get tired of coming to a website that is just a “parking lot”, but they will make a decision of whether to stay and patronize a domain website that has content and prodserv that matches their search interests.

The new direction is with content development for your domains. There’s no other way around this. All of us have domains that are great generics, but not enough of the consumer/business sectors understand STILL the “typein” or “direct navigation” process. The answer to this problem is to get relevant content on your domains as inexpensively as you can, and start a domain-by-domain review in building out what will sell on your property.

You don’t see many geo-domain owners wasting time with landing pages filled only with adlinks. They are BUILDING PROPERTIES.

Even with thousands of domains, it’s fairly cheap and easy to convert those domains to content producing websites relevant to your domain name niche, especially if you own a large amount of ccTLD’s or SLD’s that get no typein traffic. Take your .pro, .name, .mobi, .travel, .biz, .info domains and put relevant content on them. Get them indexed in the search engines ASAP.

Every day you delay, you keep your domain’s value at bay.

Nice article, and great responses by the gallery.

Stephen Douglas
http://www.successclick.com

The advertising industry has wisened up, today there are just too many adsense ads, the novelty has gone a blind spots have developed.

Domainers used to claim the power of type-in traffic – today we know much of it came from typo traffic. If people want something, they use Google, not the address toolbar.

PPC were seen to be a logic proposition of measurability and advertisers actually believed someone clicked on domains with honest intent and interest – today we know that it was actually botnets and human farms that created a lot of those useless clicks, by people masking the illegal system with virtually hundreds of thousands of domains pinching little bites to avoid detection. PPC rates have fallen dramatically sine webmaster started studying their logs and found the majority of click into conversion useless. The early players who got away with these were the lucky ones. Today Google will force you to pay back if they find click-fraud generated revenue even if it was months after it occurred.

Laws governing the use of domains has changed to the point where domain speculators have to watch their backs so carefully we are peceived to be criminals rather than speculators, as a result the once priced market of 2, 3 and 4 letter acronyms have had their values decimated because of the potential risk of ligitation always lurking behind.

The chances of striking it rich is far worse than buying a state lottery ticket.

imho, I agree domaining is no longer what it used to be. The spin stories of domain salemen has become worn and thin. And 70% of the world’s financial book wealth has just evaporated forever, far worse than in the dotcom 1 bubble burst. The money laundering days using domains as innocent instruments have died, many domain organizations are just trying to keep their operations afloat.

I don’t think, and I agree, that when you see companies like industry icons Oversee.net retrench continuously, it doesn’t take rocket science to see that the domain industry, just like the rest, is not immune to the global economic collapse.

The good old days are gone, rest in pieces. The early players are the ones who creamed off the real fruit. New commers have only cherry pits to base their hopes on. I honestly think we should stop using the word ‘domainers’ to describe our hobby (or livelihood for some), to something like ‘Ontrepreneurs’. It’s still incredible after all these long years of industry leaders trying to convince the public (and themselves) that domaining is a profession, to most of the people in your public community its just cybersquatting, TM criminals and the market of the shady click fraud underworld.

I agree that the best thing to do moving forward is to find professional partners (not other domainers) to develop your existing names out. Just a few because it will take all your time, throw the rest away cheap. Good luck guys.

Its going to be an interesting new era…

Google is

You have to explain what exactly you do when you try to tell someone what you do. But in the same reality, Ask you self what you do online and that will define what you are besides a Domainer or a Developer or either. I like to call my self an Internet Activist and people ask what I do. I tell them I work on Website. Then, they understand a little more.

Love the Article.

Enjoy DomainFest – I will be in LA for another project but will probably drop by at some point.