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Buying a new domain name, buy variations of that domain also?
Because I'm cynical, I always buy up any and all variations of the target domain name, ie. misspellings, phonetics, etc. However, there's also a lingering doubt that it's not really worth it, after all, I could use that money for more Ramen noodles :). What's your recommendation/experience?
- terrellm 16y agoI'd not build a business on a non-.com name unless I intended for it to be a part-time/passive business whose primary traffic stream was SEO. Also while the URL hacks are cool to us, our parent's just don't understand them and will type the site name + .com. I usually like to get the .net and sometimes the .org of my product, but seldom go beyond that. While it's in the domain registrar's interest to sell you .info, .biz, .us, .co, .whatever else, I don't see a lot of benefit. The one exception would be if you are marketing to a non-US country (eg. if marketing to the UK, perhaps get bot the .com and the .co.uk). If a domain doesn't pass the "ear test", where someone hears your name and must be able to find your domain on the first attempt, I'd definitely get other popular variations. If you do buy a lot of variations in the beginning, be sure and forward them to your main site while tagging them with Google Analytics. That way, you can check GA and see which ones send traffic before deciding if each is worth renewing. Shameless plug but I wrote a blog post on how to do this at http://www.keepingitrural.com/leverage-unused-domain-names-boost-website-traffic http://www.keepingitrural.com/leverage-unused-domain-names-b...
- bradleyjoyce 16y agoif whatever you're building on the primary domain is successful, you'll end up purchasing the variations down the road anyway and usually at a huge premium because someone else will have bought them up to hitch a ride on the gravy train. Might as well buy them early and save money.
- user24 16y agoI really disagreee with this. If you become massively sucessful on a myspace/google/facebook level then perhaps. But has pg bought yombinator.com? Where does dig.com take you? What about gamil.com? twiter.com? micorsoft.com? Forget about the misspellings, you're not going to lose a lot of traffic to them, people will soon realise they're in the wrong place. Save your money for better things like advertising and servers.
- bradleyjoyce 16y agoyou overestimate the brain power of the average internet user.
- user24 16y agodel.icio.us was bought by yahoo before it became delicious.com. how many people typed the wrong domain in? Quite a few probably. Not enough to stop it being a huge success, not enough to prevent it being acquired by yahoo. I think it's a non-issue.