That's your brand?

Penpal.net was the second domain name that I ever registered. It was way back in October of 1996 when domain names cost $100 to register and there was only one registrar: Internic.net.

It has taken 13 years, four major software upgrades, and countless mistakes to finally evolve into a modern social networking website for pen pals. Today I am excited to announce the re-launch of one of my oldest websites: Penpal.net.

Over the years as I transitioned from a developer into a “domain investor who occasionally develops,” I learned from the domain mistakes I made as a developer and used that knowledge to build up a better domain investment portfolio. I would like to say that an early lesson learned was to invest primarily in dictionary-word domain names, but that was one of the last lessons that shot through my mind, and only after it was too late to get in on the cheap.

No, the real lesson I learned was the power of the .COM and how hard it is to break that mold. Countless friends and family have mis-heard or mis-remembered my penpal.net URL over the years, leaving me constantly amazed that so many of my members have found the path back to my site. It was around 2001 that I realized how much traffic I was losing to alternate TLDs and made the executive decision to swiftly and decisively change my domain from “penpal.net” to “penpalnet.com”. It was this strategic move that led me to realize my next pearl of wisdom.

The second lesson: never change your domain name. Even with a successful 301 redirect effort to clean up the inevitable search engine confusion, your rankings will never be the same. Now, after seven years of no content, my original domain still receives higher SERP positions and thus higher organic search traffic. I believe this was due to an initial burst of inbound links that happened in the 90’s, but regardless of the year I have found that initial links are hard to change.

Lastly, I learned that any domain can dominate organic search but only good brands and .COMs can transcend online marketing to pass the word-of-mouth or radio test. I sometimes look back and wish I had registered almost any other brandable .COM instead of penpal.net, and had consistently built up my brand over the years. Instead, I felt chained down to the semi-valuable real estate of a dictionary-word .NET and incorrectly thought that it was a better brand.

Now I know that investing in domain names is more than buying good real estate. It’s about buying good real estate that has brand potential. I also learned that website development is more than just following the users and that it’s more important to build a site around a brand.