There was a lot of talk last week about the .ME land rush for new domains. I even tried to get a few, but ended up only getting one. There were plenty of good names available when I was looking, but I passed on most of them.
As far as affiliate marketing, I wouldn’t touch a .ME domain. Here is my reasoning:
99.9% of average people that would see an ad with a .ME ending would probably have no clue what it meant and would thing it was some weird country or scam domain. I would expect them to avoid clicking like the plaugue. .COM is king and probably always will be. Consumers feel comfortable when they see a .COM. In my own testing even with .NETs and .ORGs, nothing can touch the same domain with .COM for conversion rates.
So .ME might be cool for some other projects or for sites with geek audiences, but not for affiliate marketing.
What do you think?
I agree that nothing touches a .com in terms of conversions and click through rates.
But whats up with these posts Chad? Since you came back, we’ve seen posts on long term affiliate strategies, the adcenter desktop app, adword seminars, taxes, and now .ME domains? Are you just phoning these posts in?
We thought you said you had some really great posts coming with some great tips!!?? Love you blog and appreciate your suggestions, but we read you because you writing has substance… or at least did before.
Dude, they can’t ALL be ground shattering posts! I do have a few good ones in my drafts folder but I am still gathering data for them. To be honest, I have already given away most “secrets” I have on the blog. If there is something specific you are thinking of ask me and I’ll try to post about it.
Let me guess, you want posts with his offers/landing pages/keywords?
You’re very original Dr.NGO. Kudos to you. Be proud.
No what I’m saying is that Chad used to post about PPC strategies, choosing offers, research, etc. We haven’t seen posts like that in a while.
Chad is one of the best, imo, and I highly value his thoughts and this blog.
I hate people like this. Seriously…
It’s not like you’re paying the dude or anything. Shesh. The posts are good.
Didn’t say I was Jonathan. But as an avid reader of Chad’s, I’m sure he’d want to know what his readers thought of his posts. I’m sure he wants more readers, not less.
I am with you on this one Chad.
I gotta say, Credit-Report.me is a bad investment.
It’s far too early to tell how .me will work out. Give it a few months and .me can become a household name, and even if it doesn’t (of course its unlikely it will touch .com), i’d rather be developing on a premium .me then a keyworddashkeyworddashkeyword.com
Good point, but I don’t think it will ever catch on with the mainstream. Most people still don’t get .NET domains after 15 years….
I think the exact opposite actually. I think mainstream users who don’t care to know all that much about domains would actually find it interesting. Assuming that you have a domain name that fits well with the extension (i.e. GetHerToLike.me for one of those David DeAngelo dating offers), I think the Facebook/Twitter/Digg would find it fresh.
Think about it. This whole advertising game (these days) is about making a personal connection between yourself and the user. I think the .ME extension helps to do half of your job for you. It makes it all about them, the person who’s reading it. It’s just a matter of finding the right context to create the domain.
Dating: (DoYouLove.Me, GoOutWith.me, MakeLoveTo.Me, etc )
Weddings: (ARingFor.Me, WillYouMarry.Me, MyBrideAnd.Me, etc)
Weightloss: (TheDietFor.Me, Exercising.Me, HealthyFor.Me)
The only setback is that, in creating these domains, you may end up with too many words/characters. But if we use and market the domains correctly, then the .ME tld would just eventually become synonymous (as far as tld’s go) with personalization. Then, you wouldn’t have to worry about buying domains that fit in context with the extension. Instead, you’d just buy names that aren’t available elsewhere (GasPrices.Me, CollegeLoans.Me, CreditCards.Me, etc).
Personally, I think the .Me extension just fits in well with the new age, Web 2.0 oriented era of the internet. I’m hoping the prices drop, but all in all, I think it would help marketers more if anyone.
Godaddy is the most well known and actively advertising domain registrar as far as the mainstream is concerned. If they can use that for the .Me and shed a more lively and futuristic, yet warm and personalized, light on it there, then its basically up to us marketers to help get the job done on this end.
I’ll leave it at that.
[...] Networks made a post today sharing my views on the extension in the affiliate marketing sense. It is very true that .com has always been the king and will [...]
Updates - Slowly But Surely…
Just a quick update on what I am doing and how I am moving forward with my online business plans.
The last few days went by so fast that I really didn’t get much done business wise this weekend. I had stayed up really late Thursday night and h…
dot com is king and dot com is queen. There is an exception of dot me names if you have a good keyword… you can optimize a killer keyword for search result
and build an authority site.
Cad, Yep, dot-com is king, but I would love to have got my hands on a quirky, memorable Marry.me, Date.me or Motivate.me.
I reckon they’d be perfect for branding an affiliate site.
I’m in total agreement with you on this, Chad. I spent about an hour or so looking up some potential .ME domains… a few good ones (that are still available today, actually). I ended up buying none of them. This is because I spoke with quite a few non-web-savvy friends of mine and they all thought .ME stood for “Mexico” and would be wary of clicking on any domain not ending in .COM (or possibly .NET or .ORG would be acceptable)… I fear this TLD will be going the way of .TV — kinda cool for some projects but not necessarily for affiliate marketing. I might still end up buying one or two, just to be on the safe side. =)
I would only consider them for the benefits of potential organic SEO.
What I mean by this is that you may be able to register a domain name that is an exact match for your search term and it will hopefully rank well since the URL factors are a big part of SEO.
I think, as regards SE ranking, the domain extension is not a big factor? But for people and branding, .me is nowhere on the radar I think.
I wrote something similar to the .me since .com is more part of our language - .me will be hard to compete with the vocabulary of .com - I mean no one even knows about .net still =P
“it was some weird country or scam domain”
I agree, Montenegro is a scammers heaven. I already got scammed by a Montenegrians (but they was using .com domain). So be careful even .com’s are not safe.