Why you should have a premium .com domain
I’ve been skeptical about premium domain names for years. I’m going to keep this post short and simple. Here are two reasons your website (content or e-commerce) should be run from a premium, generic domain:
1. Guaranteed stream of visitors from type in traffic, which, I might add, are known to convert very well.
2. Guaranteed no one is going to forget your name — while its guaranteed people are forgetting your competition’s name. If you sell grills and you are grill.com, visitors are coming back (worth noting, grill.com is currently a parked domain right now.)
There are a lot of great success stories of non-keyword domains.. Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay.. but that doesn’t mean millions aren’t being made from generics. Think about it this way — everyone remembers their search engine that they visit daily, but how are they going to remember the name of an e-commerce site they shop from once a year — that doesn’t have a billion dollar marketing budget?
Your domain is your website’s foundation. If you don’t choose a generic domain, at least make sure its not easily forgettable.
I’m going to have to disagree on that one. I rarely ever remember a generic domain name, especially because there’s so many differences, e.g. grills.com or grill.com?
I think non-generic domains are the way to go, something catchy that will stick to people’s minds.
Comment by Dennis Pallett — December 20, 2005 @ 9:21 am
just register grill.com and grills.com if you are that lucky to get them
These domains bring you plenty of visitors, because there are so many people who type grills.com instead of typing grills in google. I read an article about this some days ago, I can’t find it now, but trust me: the people who domainnames like cellphones.com don’t work. They think about how to spend their money…
Comment by anty — December 20, 2005 @ 2:42 pm
Perhaps you read this article in Business 2.0?:
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1132510,00.html
Most domain owner make money either by parking the page with Pay per click ads or selling the domain to a developer. Some of these guys own portfolios that produce millions of dollars a year solely off of pay per click ads.
Comment by Andrew — December 20, 2005 @ 5:18 pm
Interestingly enough, type just the word ‘grill’ into the URL bar (in firefox anyway) and weber.com/bbq/ is the first result that it gives.
Comment by Bulbboy — March 7, 2007 @ 7:40 am