advice Darren Rowse Talks Domains and Blogging

[News]

Blogging was a medium that Darren Rowse stumbled upon by accident in 2002 as he was researching a new project – little did he know that just 18 months later he’d be one of the world’s first professional bloggers and making a living from his blogs.

Darren: I’m not overly sold on the idea of TLD’s. While it might be useful for some who struggle to get the .com I still think .com is the ideal home for most people’s blogs. It ranks well in Google and is so easy to remember.

Darren: A long term dedicate to serving your readers, the ability to communicate effectively, a topic that there is demand for information on, a willingness to experiment and learn from what you find and a willingness to put yourself out there for public critique...

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[Altrell]

While I read Darrens blog regularly I agree and disagree with him on this. .Com is by far the TLD we all remember because it was the first. However, I do see some very memorable and very marketable generics now. There are some new gtlds that could go away and no one would care. Their uses are limited and lets be honest they made no sense at all.

With that said some new gtlds make so much sense from a marketing standpoint that not owning one for some industries and promoting your business with them is a mistake. Matt Cutts has talked about serp rankings for them and that Google is treating them no different than .com domains. Also some of the gtlds make remembering a company and their website easy and also lets you know their business focus.

.com will remain the king only because people are afraid of change. The biggest problem with .com is that after 20 some years of people buying them the domain names keep getting longer as people try to find one that works for their business. The longer the name gets the harder it becomes to remember and the more likely people are going to be to misstype it when entering it into their browser bar.

I would much rather have a gtld with a shorter easy to remember name than a .com that was to long. Also I would find a domain name that is brandable. So many people are focused on keyword domain names that they overlook the brand possibilities of other domain names. Much of this stems from people trying to find the get rich forumla that keyword rich domain names might offer. If keywords were the end all for a domain name than Google, Yahoo, Monster, eBay, Amazon and many other industry giants would never have succeeded. They built their brands and marketed them to the masses by providing what people wanted. They also have memorable names that necessarily do not relate to their industry.