Way back in 2007 there was an article in, "Business 2.0" about Kevin Ham a guy who reportedly ran the Internet. He was able to acquire $300 Million dollars worth of domain names and control them for certain industries while shutting other people out. Then he would take these domain names and resell them or put them in an auction and get the highest bids.
Ham was well known for grabbing wedding domain names such as "WeddingCatering.com" as well as Christian domain names, "ChristianRock.com". According to the article he controlled the strings on certain industries. The idea of this article was kind of fascinating.
The media made a big deal out of this guy and rightly so. Back in 2007 this was kind of an unheard of play. Ham also did things with his domains like make landing pages and then ran ads on them. He was getting 1 million unique clicks a month for some of his categories. The story of his quick rise is dizzying. His philosophy is blunt, "if you control the domain names you control the Internet". At the time of the article he had a staff of 150 people to create content for him.
This was all before the age of social media and Youtube.com.
Why am I telling you this?
You can actually do what this guy is doing right now and still corner the market. Too many buisness owners try to go for one keyword name and go for the dot.com version. That is the standard way of building an internet presence. And this is the kind of fodder you will hear when you drudge off to your 7:30 AM business breakfast networking meeting. There is ... always... one computer person there that will tell you to build your business that way.... but its not your best option.
You can throw a city or county in there and it will work just the same. By work, I mean that the web domain will help propel your website to where it needs to be and that is... on the top pages of Google.
For example it can look like this:
FirstTimeHomeBuyersAnnArbor.com
FirstTimeHomesAnnArbor.info
RealEstateInvestorTulsaOK.Info
and etc.
You will have to get pretty artful about your approach and what you want. Too many times a business owner will only spring for one domain name and then hope that the phone will ring off the hook. The problem now of course is that the search engines are getting filled with new sites every day. There are a lot of people talking at the same time.
But the good news is that you can still corner the market. Guys like Ham are kind of a thing of the past. There are ways now to get your business the exposure that you need.
In 2015, I wouldn't worry about domain auctions or trying to get the best single word or two word domain name to connect to your audience. I would start to think about getting a suite of domain names to accomplish this purpose and then build web media around them.
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