(The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building A Niche Animal Site From $0 to $500,000: Picking a Domain
August 18, 2023
Hello, this is Logan with the second video for month two about domain selection.
What are the most important factors you considered when choosing your domain name for your business?
The general factors that I like to look for are two to three-word domain names. And then ideally it’s sort of a bonus with a niche-relevant element in there.
There are a couple of benefits to that. I think that there is some power to having your niche or main topic or some relevant word in your domain. I know that’s pretty old school and back to the days of exact match domain, but I still think that it can help. I don’t think it’s required. I think it’s just helpful.
Then that usually ends up with two or three words. The priority is brand ability. And if you can get some niche relevance in your brand, all the better. That’s the simplest way to put it beyond that, you don’t want to back yourself into a corner. So if your domain name was “best paint brushes” only, you are not going to have a lot of room to grow.
And while you could, Google’s not going to stop you from putting additional content on there. I think it just doesn’t flow as well. So having a big-picture brand in mind is important. So it’s niche specific, but not so niched down that you can’t grow. And that can matter too if you’re trying to exit or sell this site, you want it to have some room for a new buyer to grow it.
Is there an optimal domain name length?
Two to three words. A single-word domain can be great. If you have a pet site or a cat site and you get “cats.com”, awesome. But the difficulty in doing that is pretty high and it’s rare to be able to find these single-word domains.
So usually two to three words are more than enough to get your niche, get a brand, and get some style in there too.
What did you try to avoid when choosing a domain name?
So I actually don’t have any problem with .net or .org, especially for informational sites, which is what I like to do. They work fine for affiliate sites as well. I think .org is especially interesting and can kind of present the site in a different light and I have no problem ranking with those. I also haven’t had any problems selling those. I did sell a .net domain and have potential buyers ask why I chose a .net, which was sort of funny to me.
Just because I hadn’t really thought much about it. Didn’t have any problems with it. I also think it’s hilarious that Mark Zuckerberg’s threads used a .net, especially since a lot of people, not that they’re trying to rank that, but just sort of a funny tidbit there.
So I do avoid some of the less common extensions, you know, like .biz or .io, these sorts of things. I don’t think that it’s a huge problem to use those, but at the end of the day, unless you have a specific use case, you don’t need to use those. If you’re willing to do .com, .org or .net, you can find just about anything that you want.
Maybe with just some slight variation and then beyond that, I avoid domains that are exceptionally long. It’s going to be kind of case by case since it could be three really long words that make a domain too long. I don’t have a hard character limit, it’s just sort of feel, but if it’s a good brand and everything else is on point, it’s okay that it’s a longer domain.
What are your thoughts on buying an aged domain name vs a new one?
I’m a big fan of both. I think starting completely fresh obviously has the benefit of not having to pay more than 10 for your domain and that money can go into your content budget or any other aspect of the site.
However, I do like aged domains. I have a mix of them and aged domains. There’s always an element of risk and they don’t work a hundred percent of the time. So as long as you know that going in and you kind of have some contingency plans on what you’re going to do with this domain, if it doesn’t work for its unintended purpose, I think that as long as you know that going in, it usually makes sense to use one.
So I am using an aged domain and the biggest benefit is I would say that for people who are really good at link building and, or have a strategy in the niche that they’re going to be in and aren’t worried about link building. I think the age domain is a little less valuable for those people.
On the other hand, you don’t love link building or you want to save that time, or don’t want to hire out for it. I think that’s where an aged domain can really make sense as long as you understand the risks because you’re going to enter the competition with links ready to go, and it’s going to save you from the link-building process, or at least greatly reduce it.
The other thing that’s interesting is that with an aged domain, you’re going to have links that no competitor could get. And those are links that you could also yourself never get, in some cases, really, no matter how hard you tried, it’s going to depend on the aged domain and the niche and all of that.
But certainly, a good aged domain is going to have a link profile that could not be recreated by a competitor. That’s not too hard to find. They might be able to get a couple of them, but as far as the whole link profile, it’d be very difficult. And then on top of that too, if you are skilled with link building, it gives you a good base to build off of.
So you may be able to get more or less aggressive. It’s going to depend on skillset and budget, and then risk tolerance would be the sort of three factors there. But overall I am a big fan of an aged domain. And I think it can help, especially if you’re able to meet all the other criteria as far as brandability and whatever extension you want, having links on top of that can be huge.
How much would you be willing to spend on your ideal domain name? In other words, how valuable/crucial do you think a premium domain name is when building a content site?
I think I’ll answer this question in two different ways here. So first off, I think premium domain name, and I think this is just me, but I can interpret that two ways.
First, that could mean a premium domain name like pets.com or taxi com. In that sense, I don’t think that there’s much value. I’ve never put a huge amount of value on that. I think in the past, it may have been more valuable, but right now I think brandability makes things more interesting than purely single-word or super-premium domains. Now the other thing a premium domain could mean is an aged domain with really high-quality links or a big brand or that kind of thing. Actually, the other thing I would throw out there is we know that Google loves brands.
So that’s the other thing. It’s closely tied with links. The other thing with an aged domain is sometimes you’re actually buying a brand as well. So it’s not just those links obviously pass authority, but they can also establish a brand which can be really difficult to do. So that could even be things like social profiles, it can be things like mentions, or just presence online, which I think is sometimes undervalued when it comes to these domains.
So jumping back to the last question. So the other version of a premium domain would be something with links. I think it depends on the ROI. To me, I can figure out an ROI on links, I can figure out what I can assess. I can assign a value to those links loosely. Sometimes there’s not really a big comparison, but let’s say, you want a link from Forbes.com. You can go to a link vendor and see how much they cost. And that can help you kind of assess what the value of this domain is.
Now that’s not always going to work because not every link is viable or purchasable. So still I would look at a premium aged domain as the value of the links and what sort of effort and time it would take for me to acquire the same thing, and how that compares to the price.
How does it compare to my expected ROI, and over how long?
That being said, I don’t have a specific number. And the last thing I would add to that is a premium for a single-word domain like pets.com. It’s harder for me to assess the ROI of that compared to a collection of links. I mean, I would be willing to pay quite a bit if the ROI was there and made sense over the length of time that I was willing to invest. So hopefully that is a helpful answer.
Thanks.
