Starting a job board — begin with a good domain!

I’ll admit you can start a successful job board without a great domain, but why try? A great domain puts the wind (at least a breeze) at your back.

Here’s how Rick Schwartz puts it as he tells Brad Geisen’s story of Foreclosure.com and Property.com — how it cost him millions to brand a domain name with no end in sight to that branding and his key discovery about domains:

NATURAL BRANDING

or

BUILD and CREATE BRANDING

Brad told us his story of spending millions and millions to advertise and brand with his original 3 word creative domain name. When he switched and used a fraction of those ad dollars to buy a category killer domain name, he transformed his business. The dollars he was using to brand was now freed up to do other acquisitions and grow his business in a more dramatic way. NATURAL BRANDING may be the simplest way to describe what a great domain brings to the table.

So it took an end user to make this old dog figure a way to articulate what a domain name does in a very quick manner and have folks understand. Have END USERS understand.

So a category killer domains gives you instant gravitas. Gives you instant recognition. And gives you something that saves many millions. in "Natural Branding." The elements and benefits associated with a natural branding domain name overwhelm anything that advertising can do. But it is when you do both that the result is something that can not be obtained with most creative domain names.

[snip]

A great domain name allows you to suck and still stay in business. I equate it to the pizza stand on the boardwalk by the ocean. Each day a new group of people come and each day you serve your crummy pizza. The pizza sucks, but you are always busy.

Busy because nobody knows it sucks cuz they are tourists and are not coming back and the only reason they came to you in the first place was that you had LOCATION! Location, location, location. So that sucky pizza guy will always make money because of his location. On the other hand if he had a good product he would not only tap into the tourist, but his pizza place would become a destination and he could grow and expand and open new locations.

So while the sucky pizza guy will always make great money, he will never be able to do what the guy with the great pizza does. So when you marry a great domain with a great marketing plan and a great base idea, you have something that will grow and expand and that is what it is all about. Catching that lightening in a bottle.

Our flagship website uses LatPro.com which is short but not easily pronounced or remembered. We always have to spell it in telephone conversations. Originally it was short for ‘Latin America’s Professional Network’. Live and learn! We recently invested $xx,xxx for the DiversityJobs domain.

In addition to occasionally spending good money for a premium domain, we are also experimenting with some exact match keyword domains in less popular extensions like BoulderCountyJobs.org and RiversideCountyJobs.org – I’m a big believer in experimentation.

It took me about 8 years to learn the importance of good domains and by then, many of the most important domains in our Hispanic niche were unavailable. So my thinking about domains is colored by a certain amount of anguish, but better to learn it late than never!

Read my domain commandments for more lessons learned.

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