Stirring up the corporates

Rick Schwartz posted a great blog yesterday that is worth visiting if you run a business or are involved at all in corporate marketing. You can visit it here: How Madison Avenue let down Corporate America and how both failed.

As a seasoned domainer, I already understand the value of a good generic and descriptive domain name.

Now I would have thought that people visiting Rick's, Sahar's, Frankies and even this blog, would at least have a basic understanding of domains and how, if used correctly, they can drive at the very least, highly relevant potential customers directly to the door of a company.

At best, like the example of hotel.com that rick cites, they can drive truly massive numbers of visitors looking for hotel accomodation.

Yet it seems not. Look at this comment posted by one of Rick's visitors:

"TRAFFIC that generic domains receive is LARGELY OTHER DOMAINERS checking out what the competition or generic domain leaders like Rick are up to. Who on earth goes to Finance.com when you have Yahoo Finance, MSN Money,Bankrate, Thestreet.com wsj.com?! WHO are you kidding Rick?"

I doubt whether the majority of people visiting hotel.com would be domainers looking to see where it goes! That's such a childish comment, I wonder where the writer has been for the past 10 years.

Being based in the UK, I always wonder how long it will take Corporate Britain to catch up with the idea that domain names can provide masses of highly relevant potential customers to the doors of their businesses.

Occasionally, I am asked by business owners (or managers), whether I would sell certain of my domain names.

Here is an email I received from a nationally known company last week;

"I see you're not using the domain mybusinesssector.co.uk and as we have a business in that sector, we would be interested in purchasing it from you. As a domain name costs as little as £6, I am authorised to offer you up to £1000, representing a substantial return on your original investment.

If you would like to sell the name and receive very prompt payment, please contact me on telephone number xxxx xxxxxx".

I didn't reply. Not because the offer was derisory, but because the idiot that wrote to me clearly doesn't understand a thing about the value of the name. If he did, his offer would have had a few more zeros on it. But, he'd still have got a "no".

My domain name portfolio (and yours) will mature into a very valuable asset only once the corporate world wakes up to the fact that certain domains (not all of course) will generate natural customer enquiries day in, day out.

Example: asbestossurveys.com generates hundreds of thousands of pounds for my partner and I. What's it worth to another asbestos surveyor? A lot more than someone who would use it for Pay Per Click parking, that's for sure.

Warning: If you are selling your domain names to other domainers, for multiples of ppc income, you are making a very big mistake.