The article below is a guest post from a well-known affiliate manager who chose to remain anonymous…

Domains… so much you can do with domains, and which you can learn so much of by just being and affiliate or talking with others.

I would believe you have learned some recommendations on domains depending on your business and industry, but I’ll cover mine just in case… never hurts, and if you think it does, then by all means, stop reading me

Make sure you have a clear idea of your business and industry – the traffic for that industry, your budget, resources, and your skills. For instance, here’s a quick example – sex (dot) com is or was for sale recently – and even though its bidding will probably be huge, it might not be too profitable depending on the business. Let’s say an adult membership company… now, considering the traffic – they want people who want to see adult content videos, so think about it…. Who searches for sex anymore? If anything, they’ll search for porn and not sex – sex is more for sex education, sex toys, etc… not their real target market, and obviously conversions will be sort of crappy.

Now that I have your attention, let’s move over to gambling.

Same rules apply here. Unless you are skilled at SEO and/or at least have enough budget to pay for your resources (outsourcing SEO, content writers, back-links, etc…), then buying any domain regardless of the name might not be best purchase for newbies. Your best move here is to go for a type-in domain, either type-in at the browser search box or at Google (search engines).

Onlineblackjack.com is a great type-in domain for both the browser box and search engines. Players looking to play some online blackjack will definitely be typing it. Clearly, most of these high-value domains have been purchased already, or are just too expensive to buy from others.

So now what? Well, look for alternatives, such as play online blackjack, play blackjack online, play blackjack on the net, etc… Even though you might not be getting as much traffic as the shorter domains, you’ll be able to still target type-in traffic (those searched on Google, etc…), and since they are long-tail keywords, you’ll be targeting a niche market, meaning: less competition, and most likely, better conversion rates too (depending on your keywords).

This is definitely the best move for start-ups, and you’ll still make quite a bit of commission too, not to mention, you’ll be able to flip the domain later down the road, making enough to buy more similarities you can dominate.

Last point – don’t give up if .com is gone, try .net, .org, .co.uk, etc… go for different markets. These will still rank well for those keywords, not as high usually, but still quite strong. Plus, like mentioned, you can go over to a specific market, such as UK/EU with .co.uk – dominating that country in your specific niche. Think about it… there’s not a lot of people targeting certain countries out there, and a lot of potential numbers still waiting (some countries).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.