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I was blown away with your response to my new $1m website project (read about that here) so I have decided to kick things off with the next installment. Now that I had my niche, it was time to get a domain. This domain would become the home of my million dollar website so it had to be good. When you’re thinking about domain names for affiliate sites, its best to be as relevant as possible, but also choose something brandable.
Relevant so that you get a small ‘boost’ from the search engines but also brandable becuase you want people talking about your project or trusting the name when they land on the site. I don’t think many web users would trust the products on my-affiliate-keyphrase-baby.info.
In my case, I think the ideal kind of domain (in order) would be:
- Keyphrase.com
- Keyphrase.net
- Keyphrasehq.com
- key-phrase.com
- key-phrase.net
Therefore, the first thing I would try to do is get the .com for my keyword. As with most domains these days, mine was of course already taken. I shouldn’t really be surprised since it gets over 100,000 searches per month in the major search engines. I did check out the site and, typically, it was used for nothing but ads. Luckily, there was an ‘inquire about this domain’ link at the bottom of the page.
I sent out an email to the company but expected no reply. Surely they wouldn’t want to sell it or if they would, must know how popular a term it is and hike up the price dramatically.
I didn’t hear anything for a few days so, eager to get started, I purchased another domain. Now my keyphrase is three words, but this domain was simply the first two words followed by HQ and a .com. It wasn’t the best domain I could get, but it was certainly relevant and brandable.
Affiliate projects don’t stop if you can’t get an exact match domain.
However, four days after sending an email, I received a response from the domain owner saying they would sell the domain for $550. Perfect.
The Process
Not wanting to waste time and have the domain owner realise how valuable it really is, I didn’t want to waste time bartering on the price. I simply said that “if you sell it for $500, I’ll buy it right now.” Businesses like getting deals done quickly so this worked and they accepted the offer.
The next step was for me to sign some paperwork. Because I don’t own a fax machine, I gave my digital signature to a friend and had them send the document off for me. It turned out that our payment process would run through Escrow which I was happy about.
Escrow is often used for larger transactions as the system works differently to services like Paypal. In Paypal, you are directly sending money from one person to another. With Escrow, you are sending money to them, and then once you receive what you are buying, they give the funds to the seller.
This is much safer than services like Paypal and Escrow even comes with an automated whois checker so they can guarantee that domain names have been sold properly. I did end up paying around $50 in Escrow fees (hence the $550 price-tag) but I received my domain promptly and safely so that’s all I care about.
In Summary
$550 for a domain might seem a lot to some people. If it’s an obscure word or for a small niche then I would probably agree with them. However, because I know my site has the chance to make $30,000-$50,000 per month, $550 is really a small price to pay. In order to succeed in my niche I did not need to have this domain. However, it already receives around 400-type in visitors per month which is people who guess domain names in their address bar and land on a website.
Additionally, having a domain which is an exact match of your keyphrase certainly gives you a boost in search engines. The domain is relevant to my market and should help me with the most important part of this project: getting search engine traffic. We’re now ‘live’ with this project as this is where I am up to right now. I have the domain set-up and a basic WordPress theme, but I’ll share more in the next post!
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Woo, exciting stuff. I’m looking forward to your progress. Considering how transparent you are this will definitely be something I can learn a lot from. Feels great tackling those big goals when you’ve been focusing on smaller ones, doesn’t it? I just started doing this myself. I told you I was going to launch a blog and I’m doing it right now.
Cheers!
Interesting and inspiring case study. I’m certain you will gain a lot of free promotion by being transparent and sharing your information during the process.
Stefan you are right this is very interesting. I can’t wait for the rest of the story. Keep it coming. Thanks Greg Ellison
Hey! I signed up for your feed not knowing what to expect and I’m very intrigued by the last few posts. Can’t wait to hear more!!
~Jusine
Successful people talking, teaching, quoting everything after succeed. But before getting into success, very few challenging. I appreciate your confidence. And love the idea of teaching how you are making money.
Great post, again, Glen!
I usually don’t get intrigued by Blog posts, because, well, most are filled with fluff… however, I love Case Studies, and so far this is a very cool (and thoughtful) step-by-step case study so far.
Good stuff!
Great.
Glad to know you got your preferred domain name and decided to buy it very quick. Having a good and professional domain name will look more interesting and will draw more attention to readers, but having the keyowrds is a great boost.
Good work, looking forward to next post.
I’m really curious what domain you just bough for the price of a top-of-the-market ride cymbal!
)
Great stuff. Aiming high.. I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from this. Enjoy your trip, Glen!
Can you tell what exactly you gonna do to optimize for that phrase. I mean, I bet it’s hell of a competitive keyword, so I guess you have some tools, or know of some tricks and shortcuts to boost your search engine rankings.
Would be glad to know how are you going to do your SEO, really. I am fighting for very low-traffic, low-competition phrases, so if your system, or scheme works for those mega phrases, a bit of that system could radically help achieve my small objectives.
I’ve paid $5000 for a domain (10 years ago!) Sometimes it makes sense. But I’ve also pulled $5000 out of a $3 .info as well – just depends on the mission.
Best of luck to you Glen. By the way, your eBook on Cloud Living is brilliant.
When are you going to reveal the name and/or type of site you are building? Or will it be a secret the whole time?
When it starts making money
Glen,
How come you like keyphrase.net over keyphrase.org? Seems to me that both seem reputable.
Vince
Hey Glen, I know you use GoogleKeywords to find out the keyword gets searched 100,000 times…but how did you find out that 400 people directly type in the URL?
Cheers mate.
I was told that by the owner
Glen,
Do you ever spend time on WarriorForum? I’m tackling a pretty big niche for the first time and while I haven’t broken the top 1000 results in Google for my main keyword, I’m sure I’ll be slapping my competition around in a few months. Still going through your site so I’m sure you’ll have plenty of tips to help me get ranked.
I’ll keep you posted…
Raza
I used to, but it’s a waste of time now
Hi Glen,
Interesting post. I’m curious about your project. Thanks for sharing this info about it. People don’t usually talk about their ideas and projects. I hope you continue sharing how you are developing it step by step.
See you
Indeed I will
Thanks for your comment, buddy!
Cool Glen – I was curious how you found out about the number or ‘guessed urls’ too – I saw the owner provided that info.
Just out of curiosity – how much time do you spend a day online?
Right now I would say I’m in my 4th hour. Spent the day trecking to the post office only to find I have to pick-up my package tomorrow…doh.
Any reason?
You put out quality posts, spend time responding, creating your $1M website.. just seems like you’re busy. And I appreciate it.
[...] already written about how I purchased a $550 domain for the project, and now it’s time for the next installment. As a quick reminder to those of [...]
How the heck did you find a website that gets 100k searches a mo. for only $500, there is one I’m in talks about that I have offered $3,000 and they still said no and it only gets 50k searches a month. They won’t even tell me how much they want. I guess I just keep offering until they say yes. How much do you think your domain is worth? How much would you have paid for it?
I originally turned it down as I thought the price was a little high (it is quite long).
I believe now though that it’s worth at least $5,000.
I really have to give you props for this one. Because of this post, I now understand what the fuss is about keywords. Thanks!
Hi Glen,
Just catching up with all the news that happened to you via this blog (which I have just discovered – I was a casual pluginID reader, stumbler).
Anyway I have a question regarding existing domain name change.
I write a blog on automated trading systems development. This is a very competitive niche with lots of more or less spammy/commercial only sites. However my angle is jusst to write genuine articles to share my research and passion into developing automated trading systems.
I might have been slightly naive when I chose my domain name. Of course automatedtradingsystem on the .COM extension would have been perfect… But already taken of course (same with the .NET)! I then decided to grab automated-trading-system on the .COM extension instead (feeling pretty smart about it
Now that I have been blogging for nearly 6 months I realised that my URL:
1) might be long and difficult to remember for my readers
2) might appear a bit spammy as well (both for Google and readers)
3) does not represent my “identity” very well (whatever that is…)
4) does not attract much Search engine traffic anyway…
So I am thinking a change of URL might be adequate, go back to the black board and choose a domain name, without thinking of Search Engine. However, I am worried that I would lose/confuse some readers, lose some backlink PR juice, etc.
The problem is that the blog is growing nicely and if I decide to do a change of URL, the earlier the better.
I would really appreciate if you have any comments on:
1- the actual domain name I have now (automated-trading-system on .COM)
2- changing a URL on an existing domain that is already growing.
PS: thanks for sharing everything on this new blog which looks even better than the old one (just added you on my Netvibes page) and good luck with the $1M business plan! You rock…
@jez
i’m not sure why you’d want to switch domains as you say it is growing nicely. i’ve done the same with one blog as it wasn’t growing nicely and must say it was the right thing to do. back then, i manually redirected the links through a 301, however you can now do this with the help of a plugin (i believe urban giraffe of headspace wrote one) and keep the link juice.
all the best, uniq
I prefer XY.com to X-Y.com to .org to .net
However, .coms with good keywords are rare
[...] build a $1M website in 12 months then read the first post here. I wrote follow up posts on buying a $550 domain and my CMS and content [...]
Can’t wait for the big reveal, dying to know what the website is called and what it is about!
i know that your domain affects seo, but i certainly wouldnt pay someone for their domain. just add a HQ or whatever to the end, and it should be good to go.
Have to admit, never thought of adding HQ to the end of my domains. That said, if the domain was perfect and was available, even at what some people would consider a “ridiculous” price, I would buy, if I had the funds of course. As Glen said, if it were for a smaller site/niche, less profitable/obscure word, then he’d agree it was too much. Also like he said, if they realised, the price would have gone up even more. Which would have been a shame, I know i missed out on a domain I wanted, as i hesitated about the price, only for it to go up by 5 times the amount.
I’m a bit of a domainer myself, so nice to see someone who understands the dynamics. Amazing how many people will just say “Why should I pay $500 for a domain you probably got for $10?” And the next day, they’ll go out and pay $1200 for an ad that will bring in a fraction of the business one time only the domain might have brought in perpetually.
It’s fun digging up great domains, like panning for gold. It’s also fun selling a domain I bought for $10 for $500 or even $1000. If I’m smiling all the way to the bank, the smart buyer must be busting a gut.
I realized there’s probably much more long term revenue in developing the names rather than just flipping them. Funny enough, and that’s why I’m here, commenting on an old post.
Still, the domain benefits of an exact keyword match are many fold.
Hi Glen,
I have been working on developing easy on the tongue names, and then developing them with content over time.
If i get into blogging for a niche i love with 40K+ searches would it be more apt to choose viralmarketingHELP.com over ViralMarketingHQ.com?
Thanks for this post.
2 questions:
- why keyphrase.net is better than key-phrase.net?
- What are the websites you re using to earn money through affiliates links?
Thanks
Once again, a really great post Glen! I really enjoy reading
your articles! They are all so informative!
Thanks,
James S.
I stumbled on the first post of this case study some time ago and I was wondering if we can expect an update some time this year. The goal is so bold and that’s exactly what I always like about your writing, that is, original and out of the ordinary!
I’m working on it
[...] also challenged myself to do it in just 12 months. You can view the earlier posts on my case study here, here, and [...]
Kudos to you Glen. Other bloggers should learn from you. I’ve been in networking for years and have only been into blogging and website development for about a year now.
I am searching for a new domain name to match some topics I’d like to blog on and your posts have really helped me learn the ropes.
Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute to the blog myself in some way soon.
The one I’ve started is on Network Marketing, and it’s on a Google site, not my own – yet.
Keep up the good work.
Hi Glen, always been interested in the debate on keyphrase.com with hyphens & extensions (e.g. keyphrase2011.com) and whether it makes a huge difference. What are your thoughts? I would assume a site structured well with great back links would be able to compete with keyphrase.com?
Cheers, Henry
I think having keywords in your domain is always going to get some benefit, but at the moment, if it isn’t exact match, I think the benefit is very minimal.
Very interesting post, and I am looking forward to read about how you will develop this project. 30K is an ambitious goal.
For domain transactions, which Escrow service do you recommend?
I sure hope that was exact and not broad searches. I’m curious to know.
I’m curious to know this niche you are talking about here.
Is it part of the top 3 niches?
Sheyi