Why Purchase A Premium Domain?


While numerous factors determine the success or failure of a business, many business owners underestimate how dramatically owning a generic domain name could shift the balance of power in their favor.

Some of the top reasons to secure a premium domain include:

Professional Credibility
Consumers naturally tend to associate generic keyword domains with market leadership, and a customer's first impression of your business comes from your domain name.  A domain like Treadmills.com carries far greater authority than, say, Treadmills4Sale.biz.

  >> More about building brand equity with domain names

Generate Leads and Acquire Visitors
Popular search engines like Google and Yahoo use your domain name to gather which terms to rank your website for.  Thus, if you don't own a domain name corresponding to the key product or service you offer, you're depriving yourself of a valuable source of highly qualified business leads.

Domain names are a surprisingly inexpensive means of generating leads.  For example, whereas it would cost you about $7 per click at the time of this writing to appear on Google's sponsored search results for "project management", a term that Googlers collectively search 2.2 million times per month.  Let's say the owner of ProjectManagement.com offered you the domain name for $500,000.  Though this may seem like an exorbitant price tag for a two-word domain, it's actually an incredible deal.  If you could build a website on ProjectManagement.com and create valuable enough content that even 1% of users who search "project management" on Google click into your site — a modest goal considering the exact-match domain will go a long way towards helping you achieve that 1% or 22,000 clicks/month figure — this equates to about 22,000 * $7 or $154,000 in advertising value.  Within four months, you will have more than recouped the cost of your purchase (Source for figures: Google AdWords Keyword Tool).

It gets better still.  Most of our domain names at DandyDomains.com already receive visitor traffic, either from type-ins or referrals.  Type-ins are when users type the domain name directly into their browsers, such as entering 'www.usedcars.com'.  Referral traffic comes from links on other websites.  Business websites previously existed on many of the domains we now own, automatically providing you a starter set of potential consumers.

  >> More about capturing leads with domain names

Protect Your Brand and Block Competitors
Purchase the domain name that corresponds to your business name before your competitors do.  Because you can redirect as many domain names as you wish to a single website, many businesses purchase domain names corresponding to products or services they offer to help increase their reach, forcing competitors to spend significantly more to achieve the same benefits.

An Exceptional Investment
Premium domain names are highly lucrative and highly underrated investment vehicles.  On the day of this writing, for example, a domain name investor resold Wicker.com, a name he nabbed for $70 in 1995, for $230,000 — a 3000-fold return on his investment — to the owner of Gumballs.com.  As only 20% of the population worldwide has Internet access and this figure is rapidly growing, the availability of generic domains is becoming increasingly scarce.  By 2020, we predict that the less generic and lower-capital WickerBaskets.com will itself retail for 6-figures.

Examples of generic domains large companies have acquired include:

  • Books.com: Barnes & Noble
  • Coat.com: Burlington Coat Factory
  • CreamCheese.com: Kraft Foods
  • Family.com: Disney
  • Gift.com: JC Penney
  • Loans.com: Bank of America
  • Love.com: AOL
  • Meals.com: Nestle
  • Motorcycles.com: Honda
  • OfficeSupplies.com: Office Depot
  • PeanutButter.com: Unilever
  • Sauce.com: Ragu

See the DomainTools blog for a much larger list of generic domains owned by large companies.

Here is a small sample of generic domains DandyDomains.com has sold in past years:

  • BatesMethod.com: Bates Association for Vision Education
  • ConcreteGarages.com: Hanson Garages
  • ConferenceFolders.com: Bown Enterprises
  • EnergyCrops.com: International Energy Crops
  • LawnGreetings.com: 244-PINK Lawn Greetings
  • PersonalCooling.com: Black Ice
  • QualityPools.com: Quality Pool Supply Company
  • SIPTrunk.com: SMBPhone
  • SleepTonight.com: Sunovion (manufacturers of Lunesta©)
  • StretchingExercises.com: The Stretching Institute
  • TaxiTruck.com: Taxi Truck Northwest
  • VibratingFeeders.com: General Kinematics