Business Owner to SEO to Domainer vs Domainer to SEO to Business Owner
“Business Owner to SEO to Domainer vs Domainer to SEO to Business Owner” Wow, if this title doesn’t confuse you then please immediately submit a guest post so that I can replace your post with this one… Just kidding!
Alan Dunn had written a post earlier about Ad.ly that had a great little statement in it:
“The first step to success is to quit reading domain blogs – even this one – and focus on SEO, online marketing and viral marketing blogs.”
I love that statement and I was about to type out a long comment to compliment him but I decided that the comment was getting too long so I would just give him a quick compliment via his comment form and steal the meat of my comment for this post (Sorry Alan 
).
The reason I love that statement is because it seems that the time line of my “career” as an entrepreneur seems to be exactly the opposite career path of many domainers (although I could be wrong as this is just what I have seen first hand). I was first a small business owner then an “SEO” and then lastly a domainer. I owned (and still own) a Florida health insurance agency and so of course being the nerd that I am I wanted to put up a website to help people compare health insurance plans online.
Once the website was up and running I quickly realized that I actually needed to get people to visit the site in order to make any money
This caused me to learn as much as I could about SEO and about all of the various factors that went into building a quality website that would give the search engines and most importantly the website visitors exactly what they were looking for. Once I started ranking the website high for its target keywords and working hard to provide a ton of high quality content on the site and a great user experience I naturally wanted to duplicate the process on other websites.
The more I learned about SEO the more I came to appreciate the importance of keyword domain names. An exact match keyword domain name is the one key element of a winning online strategy that cannot be duplicated. Let me say that again: your domain name cannot be duplicated.
If we can agree that domain names have inherent value (because of keywords, length, TLD, and any other combination of these 25 rules for choosing a domain name) and that domain names are unique (fact) then it’s easy to see why having the best domain name for a given market niche online is a HUGE sustainable competitive advantage that even the deepest pocketed competitors cannot copy (unless they buy your domain name from you for $$$ and then well, that is OK too )
If you are the owner of say DogFood.com then you have a significant competitive advantage in building a business online in the “Dog Food” niche that even huge Fortune 500 companies cannot duplicate no matter how hard they try. Purina.com and Iams.com and other very large dog food companies can pay out the wazoo for the very best web developers and the very best SEO company and they can hire a professional writing service to churn out hundreds of pages of dog food related articles every day (and you thought that sorting through lists of dropped domains was boring… that is if you are not saving yourself time and red eyes by using our dropped domain alerts instead… ) BUT they can do all of these things but if you are the proud owner of DogFood.com then you have a very real and very sustainable competitive advantage that they cannot copy
(Note, I chose the domain name “DogFood.com” randomly just because my Bull Mastiff Caesar and my Pit/Lab mix Mercedes both just got done chowing down and they now need some more dog food. Also, I just noticed that if you type in DogFood.com it redirects to PetsMart.com so it appears that at least PetsMart.com recognizes the value of this domain).
All of that to say that if you are a domainer then its time for you to branch out and learn as much as you can about SEO, online marketing, and general business skills. If you are a business owner then you need to learn as much as you can about the value of domain names and about bringing your business online. If you are an SEO professional then you need to quickly appreciate the impact that domain names can have on your search engine optimization efforts.
What about you? What is your story?
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“What about you? What is your story?”
Very similar to you. Started as a small business owner (home services).
1. Built a site
2. Got no traffic
3. Checked out every book I could on SEO
4. Got good traffic
5. Started building other sites
6. Started buying good domains
7. Now very happy=)
SEO is simple but makes a ton of difference whether you will be successful online or not and whether the professional SEO’s want to admit it or not a great domain is the simplest way to get a head start on your competitors.
Hi your post is amazing, It’s incredible, I learned a lot about SEO and Man, this thing’s getting better and better as I learn more about internet marketing. Also as part of my ongoing mission to find the absolute best tools to make money, this is without a doubt at the top of my list. Everything happened so fast!
Well I guess I started off as
1. small business owner who started a small website
2. received extremely limited amount of traffic
3. stopped that line of work and gave up website
Now I am trying
1. register good domains in fields I have experience with and am starting to build websites.
2. am trying to now learn about SEO techniques
3. goal is to make this my business down the road
Great article and I am learning alot just by browsing http://www.domainsuperstar.com