As a web business, it is easy to buy lots of domains. They are cheap to buy, hosting them costs nothing extra, and you never know when that next great idea will explode. Then again, you never know if you’ll actually ever develop that great domain in your portfolio. I call this phenomenon domain rot.
Domain rot is something that is very easy for an internet marketer to fall into. After all, if one domain is good, two domains is better, and a million domains is best. Okay, maybe a million is too many. See, but that’s the goofy thing. It is so incredibly easy to get started buying a few domains when you come up with a great idea, but if you are like me, you find yourself with five or ten great ideas a month. That’s say 50-100 ideas a year.
If you were dilligent you could buy the .com’s fore each of those 50-100 ideas, but why stop there. Why not buy the .net, .org, .info so that nobody else can take them? After all, you should protect your idea from those who would snatch it away before you had a chance to do anything about it. So, just for the sake of ridiculousness, let’s say you bought all the useful domain extensions. That could be what, like 300 domains? At an average cost of $9 per domain, that’s nearly $3,000 a year potentially.
Three thousand dollars to protect your ideas doesn’t seem like a completely unreasonable investment to me. However, it’s that concept of protecting your idea that gets me. I have domains that are probably 5+ years old and they are great ideas that I haven’t done anything with. It’s ridiculous. So, will I ever touch those ideas? Probably not. Imagine if that $3,000 disappeared from your account every year going towards projects that you will never touch.
What would happen if that three thousand dollars went toward promoting your current websites? Three thousand dollars in advertising could buy you say 1000+ users to your forum, or 30,000 visitors to your website. Possibly another 300-900 leads/sales of your product. You get the idea.
I guess what I’m getting at is when you are buying domains left and right, you need to think about whether or not you are going to actually develop them into a real site within say a week or a month. If not, then don’t buy it. Period. The money could be better spent taking something you already have and taking it to the next level of success. The residual value of what you are spending on real sites or real products is much higher than the potential value of ideas you may never develop.
