For those of you who don’t subscribe to Domainer’s Magazine, I wanted to share a great article I read about Geo domaining. Most of you know that I recently found an interest in geo domaining myself, so of course this article peaked my curiosity when I read the title, “Developing a Geo Domain”. There is a lot of great information in the article. It discusses a range of topics having to do with developing a Geo domain, including suggestions on how to market your Geo domain and what are advantages to developing a Geo domain. It references all that and more.

The original article is very long. I received permission to use the article on my blog and so I decided to break it up into a 5 part series over the course of this week. Today’s first part in the series is basically an introduction into Geo domaining to help give a better understanding of what it is and how a domainer can make a lot of money from it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Developing a Geo Domain

Geo domains differ from other premium domains in one very important aspect: development. Unlike generic premium domains like flowers.com, baby.com or books.com, which can be easily monetized using the Pay-per-Click model, Geo domains typically have little to no type-in traffic. As such, domain development is standard operating procedure for Geo domains if they are to earn their keep.

Regardless of this drawback, Geo domains–notably country, city, or state Geo domains–are some of the most valuable domain properties on the internet. One of the most notable sales included a package of England.com, Britain.com and London.com, which sold for $2 Million in 1999. That may have been a decade ago, but that spectacular figure is followed by the $700K paid for Melbourne.com in 2007, $550K for Macau.com in 2006 and $500K for NewZealand.com in 2003. Even LasVegas.com, which was only leased to the Greenspun family for 100 years, sold at a whooping price of $12M in 2005.

Geo domains have a high market and resale value, mainly due to the fact that premium pure Geo domains (“pure” label explained below,) seldom change hands and are very limited in number. There’s also the so-called trend of “going local”, and these regional target markets further enhance the value of Geo domains. In a nutshell, people are now using the internet more to search for local services, locally available products and local information.

As internet searches become more useful in the local scope, we can expect the prices of lesser-known Geo domains to become higher still. They will become even higher as more and more Geo domainers develop their properties; the rise of online local advertising almost assures it.

Definition and Uses of a Geo Domain
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