Morning Folks!!
Imagine you are a football coach, your job to go out and get the best players and win games. You do that. As a coach you keep picking good players and you win time and time again. Sure not all are the players are stars, but enough are and together they make a good team.
The other coach does the same thing but picks badly. If he is blaming the pool of players he has to choose from or the money in his wallet, he is not looking in the right direction. First he needs to figure out what the other coach (you) sees that he does not. If he blames the other coach (you), he is wrong. If he blames the players he is wrong. If he blames anyone but himself he is wrong. It is a simple equation and folks can apply it to many things. Including domains. If that other coach never considers that he needs to do something differently, he will just keep losing and that is no fun. So why keep doing it?
Take this example: You are given a bag of 100 diamonds. They are mixed sizes. 20 are real diamonds and 20 are fake Cubic Zirconia’s. The rest are just really poor quality stones with low commercial value if any at all. Your job is that you have 10 minutes to pick out the best gems. A guy that knows diamonds will pick out the winners quicker than you can lay them out.
So that is what I see and refer to when talking about domains. Folks keep picking cubic zirconia’s and blaming everyone else for their lack of success. I just try and make the point that studying the difference between domains will allow you to target ones with more value and more people want. That’s called “Demand”. When you have demand, prices rise. When there is no demand, there is no dollars either.
So all the coaches out there that are domainers, I am just trying to help you to win a few games. You are spending the time, the same energy and in many cases the same dollars, but your focus is not working. Trying something new is never comfortable. Looking at things differently and applying to what you might be doing is never comfortable. But the discomfort only lasts as long as it takes you to correct things and get on the right path. The first step is by objectively looking at things in a different way. I gave a few examples and hope it has some value to someone. Pick different type players and you will get different results. You have to empower yourself. Nobody can do it for you.
Everything I write applies to domains with value. You see the price for a domain with value and potential and the price for meaningless one is the same. There is no difference. The only difference is in picking the winners. Just like that bag of diamonds. Same effort, big difference in results. YOU can change that!!
Hey, if you’re the gifted SEO guy, you can build an empire on any url in the world and it will be fine. So I am not talking to you. For us mortals, domains have to pass a series of tests to have value. Meet a series of criteria to have value. It has to have a purpose and a reason to increase your odds and have a leg up on the competition.
Have a GREAT Day!
Rick Schwartz
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Will
Rick, your diamond/cubic zirconia metaphor is perfect. It takes time to become an expert at spotting quality domains, and discipline to forego buying one that, with a casual glance, looks great.
However… if one has the patience to learn and apply sound SEO techniques, he or she can become a”dual threat” player in the domain game!
Chris
Rick – Good advice. Everytime I visit your blog I learn something new – Its like Im back im college all over again! I am relatively new to the domain industry and an trying to learn as much as I can and hopefully start at least one successful site. I have been buying and selling vintage hot wheels from the 70’s and needed to find something new to endure. I do appreciate your posts and feel that they are written in a way that can be understood and adapted by many. Keep up the good work.
Shane
I choose to run the wishbone. They’re players that other coaches passed on when they were looking for top recruits. Still talented athletes but can only compete with a pulling line and with a game of hand off deception. Not really I just couldn’t pass up the analogy
Paul Bliss
I think that’s the first time I’ve read where Rick actually had a nice complement thrown to us”SEO’s”..
Lulz..
Rick Schwartz
Bruce, Pay Per Action is good as long as you actually get paid on what you produce with no games.
Paul, I have nothing against SEO. I think a guy that owns a great domain and a true SEO expert can make a lot of money together IF they have a profitable product or service to sell.
SEO for minisites etc are fine. But limited. Always a bit of a hustle. Short term.
There has always been natural built in friction because we climb the same mountain in different ways. Domain traffic is not as vulnerable as SEO. SEO requires some maintenance and time. SEO guys never like to count their”Time” in the cost equation.
If I want to have traffic for Glass Door Knobs, then my instinct would be buy GlassDoorKnobs.com
SEO would not look at it like that. Especially if you look back 10-15 years. The IP address was just fine with them.
So we just have different instincts and it would be more productive to see which instints we could both exploit for fun and profit. ;-)
Realcostdomains
Rick – great insight, I wish I thought these up. I am hoping to score that HAIl Mary touchdown on one of these game day’s.
LosersCan'tBeHelped
Rick, you said before that Winner cannot be stopped and losers cannot be helped. Most losers won’t listen. They have names that are worth zero, but if developed they are worth low XXX. They don’t get it and never will.
Some people try to help them, but they hold on to their worthless names, worthless game plans, and worthless lives.
All newbies should first start with dotcoms, and once they make a lot of money they can branch out to their idiot pipe dreams.
Even those who know better are some of the biggest losers on the planet. They get involved with these new fraudulent extentions and try to pump them to newbies….buying names for reg fee and trying to sell them for thousands.
Everyone is complicent in these new extention scams. That is why so many people get it wrong. They see long-time domainers pumping garbage.
I am working on a plan that will expose some of these fraudsters and hopefully a few of them will end up in prison. All scammers should be exposed, expelled, and shunned.
Until that happens nothing will change.
Paul Bliss
Rick –
I agree about your climbing the mountain analogy. I completely understand why domainers have a hard time paying for seo when they are already getting traffic arriving to the site everyday without any seo efforts.
I can’t argue that logic but instead offer this – imagine taking that traffic your domain is already getting and expanding the potential for more people to walk through your doors. I’ve always felt that every page of a website is like an entrance to your store, while a great domain will get people through your main door, seo will send that person ready to buy an iPad directly to the display stand of that item.
If you’re ever willing, I’d be open to talking through a way to try this experiment out :-P
Anunt
WHO AM I???
Morning Folks!!
When you bring GREAT people together, GREAT things will happen.
Domains are a unique opportunity in time. Domains will go up faster in value than any other commodity ever known to mankind.
So save the naysaying for 5 years not 5 minutes. Then we can discuss why so many of my good friends missed such a winner.
I ALWAYS…Follow the money.
I plant seeds.
Seeds take time to germinate, mature and bear fruit.
“When you see John Jones through John Jones eyes, you will sell John Jones what John Jones buys.”
The numbers tell all. Numbers don’t lie….people do.
Any moron can sell $100 bills for $90.
Feathers ruffled? GREAT! Mission accomplished!
Have a GREAT Day!
WHO AM I???
Joe
Very true..> Have you used Mike Cohen’s services? (EPik’s competitor)? He has your testimonial on his site for mini site development.. domainstryker dot com
Joe
Anut meetpeople and uglypeople.com :P
namepros’s best
AnuntIsALoser
Anunt you are a loser and a terrible person. You know absolutely zero about business. Rick knows what he is doing, and just because he can spell it out for idiots like you does not mean it is easy to be a winner.
After all, why isn’t Warren Buffett’s sister, or his daughter or two sons great investors? Why doesn’t he tell them the secret?
The answer is that not only do you have to know how to win, you actually have to go out and do it. Most people cannot do it because they have to always run with the crowd.
You are a loser. You will always be a loser. You just don’t have what it takes.
Ellen
Really good analogy, diamonds and CZ’s. However, as a woman, I am just as happy with my CZ earrings as my diamond earrings- however, I know that my CZ jewelry has almost no resale value.
The point being that low quality domains, as you wrote at the end of your post, can be just as serviceable as high quality domains, provided that you know the basics of SEO. And those basics will take you about 2 hours to learn. There’s on-page optimization and off-page optimization, and that’s about it. It’s not rocket science and does not take any special gifts. If you graduated high school, I guarantee that you can master seo very quickly!
You Don't Understand
What you SEO people don’t get, and will likely never get is that if there are 50 people in a givin industry with average domains and they all hire the same SEO expert, then which one will do the best?
You see, there is limited room at the top of the placement. The other thing you never get is the fact that type-in traffic converts better than search. You miss the whole point, and that is with type-in names you know exactly what the person is thinking….they are typing it in exactly. That is strong.
A great name also offers legitimacy, just like when someone uses a Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail email account for something major, it takes away a bit from the transaction. Those generic email addresses create more doubt than an Aol or Msn account. That’s just the way it is.
The SEO people have to constantly stay on top of things and are always at the mercy of Google, and that means work work, and more work.
The type-ins come every hour of every day while you sleep.
How you guys and glas can’t seem to grasp this basic point is almost hard to believe. You are so wrapped up in your world or work, work, and more work, that you fail to see how beautiful the strong names are.
To use a football analogy, Tom Brady will always get the girl over Peyton Manning. Peyton could win Super Bowl’s every year and still Tom Brady would have the edge with the females. That’s just the way it is. Tom Brady has the goods and doesn’t really need to do anything except stay out of his own way. Peyton can’t comete in that area with Tom.
That’s just the way it is and every single person knows it. The SEO game is the Peyton Manning and the type-ins are Tom Brady.
One will win every time, while the other needs to get lucky to even think about competing, and even then, you would rather be in the position of strength.
David Corrie
Interesting read !
It’s hard panning for gold, diamonds & domains ?
Regarding SEO, It’s a very misunderstood area and I would like to say 99.9% of SEO ‘professionals’ have not a clue about what they are doing, hence giving the entire industry a bad image,it’s something we have come across many many times and I don’t blame any domainer for steering well clear of SEO companies.
Like domains, good ones are hard to find, most SEO co’s ‘game’ their results and work against the search engines, when in fact if you look into their criteria, especially google,you really only have to follow the letter of the law….. i.e. do what they permit and do it well.
Yes, there is a place for domaining and seo work, but it need to be clear that it takes at least a years commitment and planning, a good SEO is like a good accountant, they’ll make you money not cost you ….
Anyway im going back to dreaming up ideas for names now ….seeing if they are shiny or not ?
domain sale
Having a good URL and domain name is very important to be picked as a diamond. But these days you rarely find a good domain that exactly fits your business needs. What to do in such a case? All you are left with picking a Zirconium and hope that it fetches the value of the diamond.
steve
All I know is most domainers start in the forums. These places are nothign but sewers and is not the place to learn domains.
Forums should be avoided until you understand domains and then only go there to skim it for news and get out.
Don’t go to forums for domains , buying and selling, it is just a sewer pit.
The person shows up, goes hahaha, and jumps in and is soon broke and holding worthless domains. I am shocked when I tell people to get a plan and then I find out their plan is to find domains they like and buy them. These domains are junk, total junk, but to them they are great. I ask them if you were buying a domain would you contact this domain’s owner and offer then even $500. They never get it.
Forums have cost people so much much money , fools domains.
Just go to the appraisals section and see the junk people want appraised…
Just to the domains wanted section and see the demands these losers make and set a budget of $50 to $200.
Then have the gall to say I will only contact you if I am interested.
These are just stupid people.
Yusuf Esenkal
Hey, Rick write something mate!!
It’s been 20 days and nothing heard from you and your teachings…
Please
Best
Lucas
I liked the comparison between diamonds and domains. It’s absolutely true, there are”real” domains and”fake” domains out there.
Great post Rick!!
Gazzip
“Hey, Rick write something mate!!
It’s been 20 days and nothing heard from you and your teachings…
Please”
Yeah, I was thinking that as well, long time no posts..strange!
Hey Rick, you’re not in training with Don King are you?
Jeff Schneider
Hello Rick,
I like you am an old marketing guy. We are now seeing the power of branded names coming to the forefront in domain name valuations. You were right all along in valuing names outside the box of the pay per click crowd.
Branded names have always been the most valuable addresses, you only need look at the most valuable internet addresses for examples. We still say the most valuable domain names have not yet been developed. Good advice to any domainers would be CREATE EVALUATE CREATE.
Regards, Jeff
shell schemes
Rick, looking forward to you actively posting again, you have been very quiet
working on any big sales?
cheers
Sofia S.
Rick,
I found your post great, and I’m really proud to see that my thinking pattern regarding Domains is on the same track with the Domain King’s…wow!!! Accidentally, I had made a post on my BLOG on Domains, a couple of months ago, reflecting the unbelievable situation on the matter in my Country’s Internet reality. If you keep commenting on the”lack of the right focus” or approach for the US Web-Property Developers, -who are among the most advanced- I guess my part of the world dwells in chaos. Anyway, I’d like to know how I can get in touch with you.
Kind Regards to You and your Readers
Sofia S.