Morning Folks!!
A meaningless .com has no value. None. I would rather have a one word .whatever. Worthless is worthless and a risk beats worthless. Did I just change my view? Hell no! Just gave a starting point comparison. I will go into it much deeper as you read on. I just described the POINT where .whatever comes into play for ME and maybe for YOU too.
As I said this morning on DomainSherpa, if you pick crappy .coms you are not going to be able to pick better .whatevers.
When I buy a domain for $10 I don't count it as a $10 purchase. I count it as a $100 purchase because I am buying and looking at it as a 10 year purchase. So when I see a domainer with 1000 worthless domains and he is broke and does not know what to do I just wonder why he does not dump every one of them. Keep your best 10 IF you really even have a best 10. But a portfolio with 1000 domains to me is a guy with a $100,000 worth of spending power and he does not know how to use that power. How to make a 10 year deal with that $100k. Consolidate to 1 domain or a handful of them. Pay them off over time.
When I ask somebody to tell me their 2 or 3 best domains and they can't, guess what? They can't for a reason. That's sad.
A $100,000 domain can be bought TODAY and with the same $$$ you would pay on registration fees for pigeon shit, one can actually buy something life changing. So many ways to climb this mountain and find gold but folks have weighed themselves down with aluminum foil and dirt.
And for folks that go after .whatever. you better be focused on 1 word domains that actually mean something. If you play it the way you are today with 3 and 4 unrelated words.....not going to happen in 1000 years! If the left of the dot has no relation to the right of the dot, then what do you have? A recurring bill is what you have.
What happened to all those guys with a million domains in their portfolios? They are gone! That game is over. Few survived. That's about to happen to those with crappy domains. Even with a .com. Today I gave an example of a crappy domain. Something I seldom do but on DomainSherpa, that is the job description. EcommsConsulting.com was the one I picked during the show to talk about. What do you want me to say? It's worthless from where I sit. And it is worthless for a number of reasons. If you want to debate the point, don't. Just go buy it from him instead. But I give solid reasons why it has no value.
Folks are wasting tens of thousands of dollars by not taking the time to do it right. I keep saying how sad it is. Especially when the market is filled with bargains. Great domains at bargain basement prices all over the place and probably for the very last time. By this time next year, THAT game will be over as well and there will be plenty of .coms dying on the vine.
Worthless was worthless from the get go. But events move even worthless right off the table to oblivion.
However it is still a false choice whether anyone is really forced to use a non .com.
See for $500-$2500 there are GOOD domains that would serve the needs for ANY business. Some are really good domains. They are plentiful. Just because folks have yet to make the mental leap of the real world parallels I have talked about for all these years does not change the facts of what is coming and the mental leap that they will eventually make. That takes EXACTLY 20 years to change that mindset. I ask only one question"
"If you open a store in your town today wherever that town is, how much does it cost?"
Please you MUST add up each and every expense. Yes, garbage counts. Yes, insurance counts. Yes the furniture counts. Yes the employees count. Yes the electric counts. Yes the RENT counts. Yes it ALL counts. How many thousands is that on an annual basis? How about over 10 years? How big is the radius of your service? Is it worldwide or only as far as a few miles. Could it be worldwide? Can you expand? How much would that cost?
Your damn store SIGN alone would cost you more than the domain name.
This is all almost primitive that so few have connected the dots. But as you see the sales going up, they are starting to figure out just how powerful a great domain is and how inexpensive it is to maintain over the years. Expand over the years. I mean that alone should do the trick.
40% of business is "Word of mouth" and few on the Internet have gotten that memo. If you know that 40 cents of every dollar you make is word of mouth then you would think folks would focus on what might be the biggest pool of customers they have. So .whatever has to do one thing and one thing only. It MUST be memorable and easy to communicate to 3rd parties that you do not communicate directly to.
If that communication is confused and they end up somewhere else, then you lose. And if that somewhere else is a competitor, then you feed him while you starve. You grow HIS business while destroying your own. You work for him as his slave and he laughs and you don't even know you are that slave.
I talk about the foundational elements that make a domain have great value to multiple parties as opposed to domains so isolated and out there that it is like waiting for a Greyhound bus at the North Pole. Good luck with that.
Rick Schwartz
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