I want to be in the domain business. Now what?

Many people enter the domaining business without a clue as to what comes first. The quoted comment that follows was originally posted by Mark in response to a blog entry some months ago. With Mark's permission, I have repeated his comment, below, in its entirety. If you are new to domains and domaining, it is a must read!

"As long as we’re telling stories out of school, I’d like to suggest a little guidance. If I was new to the business, I would buy only .COM domains I could hand reg for about $8 each. This would be generic, descriptive, NO TRADEMARK OR EVEN SMELL OF TRADEMARK, popular keyword based products, services or geographic locations from two to four words in length. No numbers. No hyphens. Google avg. monthly [EXACT] “Local” search count in excess of 1,000 searches and a minimum PPC of $1 or more.

The higher the ratio of avg. monthly [EXACT] “Local” search inquiries to actual number of search result published pages returned by Google when you do a search for the “keywords in quotes” (with spaces), the greater the likelihood that you will have a top 30 page result ranking (first three pages) when those exact keywords are searched (without quotes). That means the websites you develop in the next paragraph down will have a modest amount of ACTUAL SITE VISITORS (these are helpful).

Build a four page minimum “minisite” w/ original content with several photos and 250 words per page should do the job. Start with Adsense and move on to affiliate relationships. Later, get your own advertisers. What you just did will account for the lion’s share of your SEO. Good, interesting content, keywords – now forget about all this SEO tinkering. Begin development of Domain #2 instead. Then 3. Blah, blah, blah.

Domainers won’t offer you squat for the words I’ve just described, but that’s okay because you won’t want to sell them. They’ll be making you too much money. 1,000 domains and 30 yrs later, move to Florida and retire – maybe next door to Rick Schwartz.

If I missed anything, please fill in the rest!

AND STAY AWAY FROM ANYTHING THAT EVEN MAKES YOU REMOTELY THINK OF A TRADEMARK DAMMIT! YES! THAT INCLUDES “DINNYLAND”! (UNLESS YOUR NAME IS “DINNY”, WHICH IT AIN’T!)"

For application of the above advice, Google search the following keywords with or without quotes:

unstructured information
lemon sour
automatic pencils
small business copiers
movie rental releases
creme de cocoa
high quality wigs
engraved pet tags

Mini-sites represent little more than a stop-gap solution for domain developing. They may temporarily stop the parked page bleed-out, but don't fool yourself into believing this is a long term, sustainable solution. No doubt that in the future, those mini-sites Mark refers to will need to evolve into fully developed, content rich portals that become the ultimate source of information for the product, service or subject matter represented by the keywords of the domain name. Getting it done with multiple sites will be a challenge, but not one that is insurmountable. I wouldn't be surprised if Google rolled out its own product similar to DevHub.com - only with all the usual Google bells and whistles.

It would certainly be fitting, in that Google (IMO) unknowingly shifted the domain industry into overdrive when it began to offer ways to monetize domain names without adding meaningful site visitor value to the domain space. The law of unintended consequences took over shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, the underlying concept of longtail keywords still holds true. Managing them efficiently for profit will be the real work, but you can be sure that the days of the 'lazy domainer'* will become the stuff of nostalgia and no longer a viable business model.

*No offense intended. This is merely a reference note to indicate a quantum shift in the domain industry that will bear little relation to what has come before.