An end user perspective on finding a new domain

[mhdoc]

Sitting in my garage are boxes and boxes of sheet music and music books that were bought by Great-grandparents, parents, spouse and child. The publication dates range from about 1900 to 1990 with the bulk of it from 1930 to 1960. If placed on a shelf there would be 10 to 15 feet of it. Most is church related and there is music for piano, organ, marimba, violin, voice, marching band, etc.

I like to build niche sites that gradually gain organic traffice from long tail keywords. I use the niche sites as informational sites and link from them to a central catalog site (Shopify) to handle actual sales.

I looked up VintageMusic and, as usual, the .com, .net and .org are taken. Some optimist thinks the .net is worth $1,188

So, I have my choice of the other 1,000 or so possible extensions and am wondering what some of the experienced domainers here might choose and why.

I could go by price and pick up a .xyz for $1.99. Maybe .club would have value down the road. I suspect the most value might be from building a Shopify store with it & selling on Flippa after has has some sales and traffic.

Other thoughts welcome.

 

[hawkeye]

Going with .club may not be such a bad idea, as I'm sure there are many others that collect vintage music sheets etc., and you could network etc. with them. Now would you want to start and run a 'club' (ala forum) that..would be up to you.

The extension kinda boils down to - 1) what is the intent of the site, private/public/personal. 2) is it a collection gallery, showroom gallery, blog, sales platform. etc. 3) are you looking for type-in traffic, advertised traffic, word of mouth traffic, stay-off-my-site traffic 4) and most important ..how much do you want to spend!! .com would be great, but is it 'needed'??

You know the game, you've done this long enough. But some alternate extensions are really not that bad to use (just drown out the doomsday domainer opins ), and again determining what is your sites intent may make it easier. The domain name world is changing, whether it's welcomed or not, and acknowledging and making some adjustments to it now, may be just prove to be advantageous tomorrow. ..just sayin'.

 

[Domainace]

I would go for the longer but more descriptive VintageSheetMusic.com, if that weren't also taken in those 3 extensions (the .net owner wants $2500). I would avoid the newer TLDs, especially if I hoped to sell the site after developing it. If you plan to keep it though, and can't find a suitable .com, why not?

More than the TLD, my concern with vintagemusic is that it's too broad, and it doesn't make clear that the site is for sheet music. It could a musical instrument shop, or a site with old recordings and links to YouTube. A site with old sheet music like your would be a great site, so I would want a more descriptive name.

 

[mhdoc]

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

It really is an interesting time. Given that I am looking for organic traffic from long tail key phrases there really isn't any downside to going deeper. VintagePianoSheetMusic.com is available As long as visitors are finding my sites via search a long/ugly domain doesn't hurt my needs.

NamePros user Vivaldi made a comment that sent me to DigitalOcean and ServerPilot.io where for $5/mo I can probably host 10-15 little WordPress sites. So if I want to stick to .com it is certainly affordable to niche down as far as necessary to find acceptable dot coms. It might even be optimal in terms of quick and easy organic rankings with minimal effort and maximum targeting of likely customers.

Of course there is some fun in thinking about a big future payout from building on a more generic but new tld which gets popular. Then I could have my cake and eat it too. I could sell off my music for a couple of years and then sell the whole website.

The point of posting this was to illuminate the number of choices end users have for selecting domains these days. So many posts have an astonishingly narrow domainer viewpoint.

 

[bluebox]

eVintageMusic is available
Something like VintagePianoSheetMusic is way to long to type in... by the time you finish it you'll probably make a few typos (esp. on mobile)

 

[mad409]

Wait for .music it's coming soon...