Very nice article! It’s a beautiful example of how domain owners, or even “potential domain owners” don’t understand what to do with a power premium natural domain. It sells the point that a lot of people “don’t get it” about domain values, even when they own a great domain. What’s ironic is that thousands of domains like this have been “devaluated” regarding your expertise of SEO placement because the owners of the domains chose to park them at PPC landing pages. As we all know, PPC pages don’t get indexed by SE’s. So these domain owners chose to make the quick easy cash that the PS’s paid them.

This doesn’t include Internet Real Estate, with Zappy, Andrew Miller, and Peter Hubshman, who have built chocolate.com into a business that could sell for $100+ mil. However, they paid big bucks for the domain and then invested even more into building it into one of the world’s top online chocolate sources, competing with See’s, Ghiradelli, Hersheys, and Mars, all billion dollar companies.

So your initial complaint and disgust about the domain in question not being built out is correct, except many domain owners of “natural” domains couldn’t afford to move in that direction, or didn’t have the understanding that investing/getting capital to build out the domain would have been very lucrative to them.

The key phrase in your article, is that you said:

…”He was marketing a one word, common last name dot com domain that certain would be worth a five figure sum to the correct company.”

Todd, I know if you had this domain in your bag, and you were advising this domain owner even three years ago, that the domain name would be worth HIGH SIX FIGURES, not “five figures”.

So if this guy is selling a domain name that hasn’t been promoted online properly, and he’s selling it at five figures, it might be a STEAL for a company to nab it and then work on it to bring it up to speed. You know that certain domains may come with baggage in relation to the SE’s, but if this domain isn’t in that category, then a fresh start is new ground, and five figures is a great price.

Ultimately, your mention of the price for the domain is logical. I understand your point to be “how could this guy not utilize the value of this domain for 15 years?”. That’s a great question. But for domain buyers/investors/endusers… this domain is RIPE for the picking! Maybe you should contact him and get an exclusive broker agreement with him, and get a commission shopping it around.

You have to admit, a category-killer one word domain, for only five figures, is a sweet canvas for an SEO expert like yourself to unleash a tortured Van Gogh masterpiece upon it, making it worth 20 times more than what the investors paid to purchase it and spent to build it out.

It’s all relative bro, but I get your intent in your article. I think there are hundreds of us domainers all guilty of allowing this to happen to our domain names by parking them instead of building them out. That’s why I joined up with WhyPark last year as the VP of Biz Dev… and am weekly adding my generic ccTLD’s, non dotcom, and longtail niche domains to their service.

If any of your readers want to get my inside help in building out their domains that they know are potential power websites for an enduser, they can sign up through my link below and take advantage of my knowledge and connections in making sure they have their domains handled “with care”. However, I know your expertise in SEO, which is something you should also offer to incorporate within the domain content development websites as a service, like WhyPark.com, AEIOU.com, DevHub.com, and NoParking.com. All of these respected websites have a plethora (yes, I just used that word) of clients who NEED your services to utilize all these companies’ great content building features.

For your readers who care about their domains that aren’t making much at Parking Services (PS’s), and they want to do what you are writing about in your article (begin to utilize the power of their domains), they should sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/l5ahkx

After they sign up, they should contact you for your services in helping them establish their domains across the SE world, using the new and easy features offered by Whypark.com and other content building companies. (I’m avoiding the “duplicate content” argument right now, because I believe every website should have original content mixed in with any possible “duplicate” content. We all know that syndicated services (AP, Reuters, etc) send out duplicate content every hour to thousands of news websites, and those websites aren’t “blacklisted” on SE’s because the news sites also throw in page design changes, different articles, and basically “mix it up”.

Hope to see you at the next SEMPDX meeting in August, and the PacNorwest Domainers first meeting around the same time.

cheers!
.-= Stephen Douglas´s last blog ..WHAT DO END USERS REALLY THINK OF DOMAINS? =-.