BLOG$ FROM BLOGS

All Good Domain Names Are Gone

Copyright 2008 by Jane Chin, All Rights Reserved.

If you are looking to earn money with your blog, I would say domain names are important, but not as important as domains have been made out to be.

If you’ve been blogging under a “vanity domain name” - that is - your own name as the domain name, you may wonder if you should register a more descriptive domain name.

The problem is, all the “good” domain names may have been taken, so you’ve read or been told.

Now, when I register for a new domain name, I almost always expect it to be taken. That a domain name was not yet taken is a bigger surprise to me than if it was.

Getting good domain names used to be about timing. You’re gambling on someone else not thinking up the name you planned to use. I’m not surprised that domainologist Dennis Forbes used the word “bubble” to describe the emerging domaining business.

Many domainers see domains as virtual real estate, and are getting into the domaining business hoping to make a quick buck flipping the domain real estate. Some veterans have made millions in the domaining game. My brother had recently entered the domaining business, and spoke of buying tens of thousands of domains the same way a commercial real estate investor talked about purchasing investment properties.

Way back in the mid-1990s I really wanted to get my name as a vanity domain (www.jane.com - I’d link to this but the link doesn’t go to a live website). Unfortunately I was a few months too late; that domain is booked through year 2012, and I suspect, beyond. That was when registering domains cost over $100. Happily, I did get my full name domain (www.janechin.com), which I currently use for one of my blogs.

With domain names becoming a commodity, registering domains now costs less than $10 per year. The intellectual property behind this commodity is what is giving domain names their value. Sure, snappy domains may have all been taken, and some are parked as nothing more than a page of ads.

I believe, as Dennis Forbes believes, that snappy domain names have been helpful, but the value would not ride high forever. Shorter domain names will yield to descriptive domain names. This means combinations of phrases will be just as valuable, and even still available.

Technology will also help equalize the power that domain names can hold over your blogs. If a reader comes upon your blog and becomes intrigued by what you write, he or she can simply subscribe to your blog and access it from a feed reader, instead of having to remember your domain name or bookmarking it to revisit. Right now I use Google Reader and subscribe to the blogs that I visit regularly. I access all the feeds on one page.

We still have room for registering some catchy phrases. Some of the descriptive domain names I’ve registered:

A Patient’s Perspective
Live Your Inspiration
Backstabbing Coworkers
Back to the Nest
Drink Fiber
Targeting Tumors
Parents in Debt

You can already get an idea of the theme or focus of the content based on the descriptive domain name.

Here’s to your creative mind to nabbing your desired domain names!

Citations
Have all the good domain names been taken?

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