The following is a guest post written by Morgan Linton. Morgan is the President of Linton Investments, a Los Angeles-based Domain Investment Firm. Morgan runs a ccTLD Brokerage Newsletter and is the publisher of ccTLD Investors magazine. Morgan writes about his adventures in Domain Investing on his blog – MorganLinton.com.
Many people see the ccTLD market as confusing – how could anyone understand all these different domain markets all over the world?
Well the answer is – they can’t! There is no way you can expect to be in expert in all ccTLDs – but I can tell you this – you’re an expert in at least one and that’s the easiest place to start!
So what ccTLD are you already an expert in? That’s easy – the ccTLD associated with the country you currently live in! For me that was .US and my great experience with the .US market caused me to expand into the over twenty markets I’m invested in today!
Now to go a level deeper. Suppose you, like me, live in the US so you want to get started with .US. Now let’s go a step further – what city do you live in? Suppose you live in Berkeley, California (my hometown) - well then maybe you’d want to start looking at some domains like BerkeleyRestaurants.us or BerkeleyHiking.us – pick a particular area that you have fresh content ready to go based on your own experiences.
Start small and buy 5-10 domains in the ccTLD of your home country focused on the part of the country you are the most familiar with. Just think – now every time you go to a restaurant – you’ll have new content for one of your sites!
The same applies for any other ccTLD – if you live in Germany, start with .de – if you live in South Africa – start with .co.za – like Warren Buffet says – invest in what you know!
Once you get comfortable with one ccTLD you can start expanding to others using the same approach. I got started with .co.in and .in through having a number of Indian friends all who watched Cricket constantly. They told me how popular cricket was in India and I started buying Indian domains that had to do with cricket. Before I knew it I was getting direct type- in traffic on a number of my domains – but it took understanding some information about the country or region first.
Suppose every year you take a vacation to France and stay in a particular city. Well now you can start investing in .FR because France would be the country you know the most about next to the country you live in.
That’s it – while this may seem a a bit oversimplified it’s amazing how many people hold-back on investing in ccTLDs simply because they don’t know where to start. Once you’re started I think you’ll find that ccTLDs represent a great way to expand your portfolio and invest in the Global Domaining Market!
Michael Berkens of 
