New readers to the blog: Welcome! Please read What is this Blog About. It explains how I am an experienced ccTLD domainer, but completely new to .com domain investing. You may also like to read about My Domain Investing Journey So Far.
I registered my FIRST CHOICE Domain Name. How rare is that?
I recently made my second .com investment! Like my first .com purchase, I again had some trouble with the purchase – but luckily not a potential trademark issue this time.
The domain is I bought was: NZDomainer.com. Obviously nzdomainer.wordpress.com just wasn’t going to cut it for a domain blog!
So I went to the world’s number 1 domain registrar……… Read on to hear about the trouble I experienced…
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Distraction has been a big challenge for me the past few weeks. We are almost ready to put our house on the market. We have never done this before, and it is a big, stressful jump into the unknown.
Anything to take my mind away from all the work still to be done, and the people I need to wrangle to make this all happen, is welcome.
Twitter, Google, Food, My phone – anything seems more exciting than slaving away out doors, getting the house ready for sale.
One of the best ways to procrastinate getting your house ready to sell, is to start a domain blog. I will tell you, blogging is a very effective way to avoid physical labour!
I have been trying my best to avoid time-wasting ‘crutches’ like Google. The internet is a distraction machine, full of blue links which promise more enlightenment – if you will just click one more time.
In my efforts to stay away from Google for a few weeks, I got thinking. Why even use Google? 90% of the time we are going to the same websites day after day – why do we have Google search so readily available on all our devices?
When we know what website we want to visit, why do we search on Google for it anyway? Searching means another step, and more distraction on the way there.
But Google or Apple were conspiring against me when I typed ‘Godaddy’ into my Safari App. There is only one Godaddy, take me to the site please. But alas, I am greeted by a page of search results.
Is anyone like me, and NEVER click on Google Ads? I spent many years publishing websites where Google Adsense was the main revenue source. Google’s number one rule when you are an Adsense publisher is to never click your own ads.
So for fear of getting my Google Adsense account shutdown (it provided a full time income) I somehow trained myself to never click on any Google Ad – my own, or anyone elses for that matter!
To this very day, whenever I do a Google search, I always scroll down past the ads ,to click on the organic results. Even if the Google ad is for the website I want!
Is this just me?
I guess there is also a part of me that sees through marketing. I like to be a conscious consumer. I don’t just go clicking any link, it better be giving me the exact thing I am after.
To me, the first organic result is what I want, and I ALWAYS scroll past the ads. Anyone else the same?
I remember watching a friend do a Google search once. They searched, and instantly clicked on the very first link on the page – which of course was an ad. I was taken aback! “You know that’s an ad right? That is not necessarily the best website, it’s just an ad at the very top of the page!” But I was greeted with a “Meh, I dunno.”
Do most average consumers always click the first result whatever it is? Is the trust in Google that automatic? Probably. 20 years of search training.
Anyway, back to GoDaddy…. you can see how easy it is for me to get distracted. The house will never be ready at this rate!
But after avoiding Google lately, it was actually my friend this time. I scrolled down to click on the first organic GoDaddy result, but something caught my eye. GoDaddy was offering $1.25 .coms!
Could this be one of the few times in my life where I actually click on a Google Ad? For a $1.25 .com, that I am about to buy anyway – hell yes. So I went against my nature and actually clicked on a Google Ad. I’m so dramatic.
I then took the scary step that all new business owners take. That all new bloggers take, that any one who wants to put an idea on the internet takes. I searched for the domain name I wanted. NZDomainer.com.
And success! NZDomainer.com was available! I mean, no one else would ever register a domain like this. There are like 10 actual NZ domainers, and they are a very secretive bunch. Not the types to go around talking about domaining. Especially not on a website.
New Zealand suffers from ‘tall poppy syndrome’ where if one person stands out a little, they get chopped down. It’s cultural thing, and I think this phenomenon is quite common in smaller countries.
In a country where everyone is your neighbour, everyone is your equal. When somebody works on something that may set them a little ahead than everyone else, they need to be pulled back down. Otherwise everyone has to do more work to keep up! What a terrible way to live.
It’s not really this bad, but there are certainly instances where people get jealous of anyone getting ahead. I’m sure it is common everywhere, but especially in smaller countries.
So my point is, that my FIRST CHOICE .com domain name was available! Who else can say that? Who says hand-regging is dead!
Jokes. Hand-registering domains IS dead… for domains that more than one person might want anyway. (Except for new, cutting edge terms obviously).
So NZDomainer.com was available, and at a nice price of $1.25! I added it to my cart.
Whenever I have purchased a brand new domain from a registrar, I always get a little worried that by the time I check out it will be gone. Rick Schwartz has told many stories on his blog of the exciting mid 90s dotcom gold rush. One of my favourite was where he would look up the Whois of domain he wanted to register, and someone had just registered it minutes before he got there! What a thing to witness.
I actually did personally witness something kind of similar to this, but 1000 times less lucrative, in the .CO gold rush of 2010. But I will save that blog post for another day. Ha ha!
So after telling GoDaddy that I didn’t want Privacy, I didn’t want hosting, and I didn’t want a foot rub, I made my way to the check out. Can you guess what happened next?
My $1.25 .com was now $27.92! Hmm.
So I tried again. And again. And again. I emptied my cart. I logged in, I logged out. I went back to Google. I clicked on the ad (again – very hard). My precious domain was $1.25 in my cart each time, but $23.99 at the checkout. ($27.92 New Zealand Dollars = $18.61 USD).
So I cried a little, cursed a little. I swore that I would not pay a standard renewal when it said $1.25 on the previous page. I did what anyone would do and I went to a different registrar.
To be honest, because the domain was for a project, I didn’t really want it in my GoDaddy account anyway. I like to keep all my domains for actual websites in separate registrar accounts from any investment domains.
So I went to my favourite NZ registrar 1stDomains and registered it there. It turned out to be lower than the GoDaddy price. Go figure. But GoDaddy push makes things super simple, so I will of course be back to the big G, to hold my domain investments.
Now, I have a ‘slightly’ more official sounding blog. NZDomainer.com. Welcome!
I do have to give a little plug for WordPress here. The WordPress.com system is super easy to use. I was able to transition over to the new domain very easily. The domain was live on the internet about 3 hours after purchase.
When you are starting a new project (like a blog), the thing is to keep momentum. I personally don’t want to be mucking around with hosting my own WordPress somewhere. The point is to focus on writing, and not get stuck in the details of plugin this, theme that.
So I hope you will excuse the rough edges of the blog for now. There aren’t many bells and whistles, special features or pictures of my cat. Yet.
The race is on, to keep writing and writing and writing. Before I get pulled to the dark side, which is the physical labour hell of finishing this house!
I just want to start researching and buying names! Maybe when we sell the house I should use all the money to buy some killer one worders?
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NZ Domainer 