One of the things that interests me in the on-line world is the power of domain names.

Although I don’t attribute all or even most of my successes to domain names, I can say that they play significant role in my business life.

I discovered domain names by accident when I was asked by a web design company, what domain name I wanted for the recruitment company I owned at the time, with my brother.

As the company’s initials were “CPC”, I said I wanted cpc.co.uk.

Even back then, in the very early days, all of the three letter domains had gone, so we had no chance of getting those initials.

In can’t remember what we settled on at the time, but it was pretty long and rubbish – we just didn’t understand the concept of domain names.

But, because of our disappointment, I started looking into domain names, which at the time were priced at around £100.

One day, I received an email from somebody telling me that the cost of domains had just been slashed, to under a tenner.

I was online within minutes. David-Carter.com was one of my first names – the non-hyphenated one having been registered a long time before by a singer/songwriter of the same name. I did manage to grab the .co.uk though.

Part of my interest in domain names came from the fact that in my forst ever job at 16 years of age, I used to work for the Department of Transport in one of their local vehicle taxation offices.

One part of my work was to handle car registration transfers, at that time something that only the rich were interested in doing.

One of the registrations I transferred in those early days was DJC1, my own initials. The value at that time was something in the region of £20,000 I was told. It was 1977!!

Around 3 years ago, I managed to acquire DJC.co.uk, so I did learn something!

Given that there are far more Internet users than car owners and a lot more scope for profit online, I started buying domain names in some volume, trying to stick to what I knew – which, looking back, was relatively little.

I registered some really bad names and thought that every one of them was a possible winner.

Since then, I’ve mixed with industry experts (some of whom have their own blogs listed on my site) and asked questions, taken part in forums and learned everything I could about the subject of domain names and Internet Marketing in general.

After more than 10 years in the domain industry, I’m still learning and still making mistakes. I think everybody else is too. At least I hope so!

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