The semi finalists for the 2008 Geo Domain Expo Awards have been announced, and voting is now open. Voting can be done directly on the Associated Cities website. It’s great to see the leaders of this rapidly growing industry being rewarded for their hard work. When the industry has evolved 5 and 10 years from now, these people will still be at the forefront – they have the best domain names. It’s hard (or impossible) for newspapers and other publications to even compete with these names.

Best Monetized GeoDomain
Which site do you feel is generating the most advertising and/or commission revenue relative to the size of its Geo market?
LosGatos.com
PalmSprings.com
PigeonForge.com
Richmond.com

Most Economic Impact
Which site do you feel has generated the greatest positive economic impact on the local businesses in its Geo market?
PalmSprings.com
PigeonForge.com
Richmond.com
SanAntonio.com

Most Influential GeoDomain
Which site would you say had the most influence on how you have monetized and/or developed your GeoDomain?
PalmSprings.com
Richmond.com
Vegas.com

Best GeoDomain Technology
Which site do you feel has taken GeoDomain technology to the next level?
NewYorkCity.com
SantaCruz.com
Vancouver.com

Best US City GeoDomain
Which site do you feel is the best US City GeoDomain?
NewYorkCity.com
SanJose.com
Vegas.com

Best US State GeoDomain
Which site do you feel is the best US State GeoDomain?
Florida.com
Hawaii.com
SouthCarolina.com
Vermont.com

Best US Destination GeoDomain
Which site do you feel is the best destination-oriented GeoDomain?
Branson.com
PalmSprings.com
PigeonForge.com

Best International City GeoDomain
Which site do you feel is the best International City GeoDomain?
Acapulco.com
Glasgow.com
Vancouver.com

Best Country GeoDomain
Which site do you feel is the best Country GeoDomain?
Australia.com
France.com
Ireland.com

GeoDomain Hall of Fame
Person you believe has done most to promote the Geodomain Industry!
Jessica Bookstaff
Castello Brothers
Patrick Carleton
Skip Hoagland
Dan Pulcrano

Developing a website takes the same amount of time whether you are building it on a good domain name (CoffeeHouses.com) or an average domain name (FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com). Likewise, the cost of developing a website is pretty much the same whether it is a good domain name or a poor domain name. For these reasons, I would prefer to only develop very good domain names rather than putzing around developing new registrations (like I did with DebtAssistanceClinic.com).

When you are building a website, there is absolutely no guarantee that your website will be profitable and make money. No matter how good the site looks and how high it ranks, you can’t guarantee it will earn your time and financial investment back. The more effort you put into link building, content writing, search engine optimization…etc, the greater financial reward you will reap. Doing all of these things takes a considerable amount of time, and as you know, time is money.

While it’s great if you built a website that makes $2/day with Adsense on a low quality domain name, it will be difficult to get someone to buy it for more than 2-4x annual revenue because there is considerable risk in this type of investment. Basically, after many hours of work (let’s say 5 full days) you have a website that may make $700/year. Personally, I think it’s hard to justify spending a ton of time build a great, money making website on a poor domain name.

I’ve noticed a number of developers “bashing” domain investors for parking their domain names rather than developing them. Many of these developers, designers and SEO experts talk about how they could make one of these parked domain names into a huge money making website, and the owner is stupid for parking. While I may agree that parking can be a poor solution in some cases (could cause Google de-listing for one), it is far easier to make money on a parked domain name than to try and build dozens of websites on a domain investor’s prime domain names (all without a guarantee of any incremental revenue).

To the people who think they can do far better developing a name than those who park, I challenge you to go out and make a strategic decision to find a good name and develop it. With your expert plan, why not go out and find an investor who would be willing to front you the money to implement your plan. There are also some fantastic financing options like Domain Capital that can help you pay for your name. With all respects, if you have a plan to develop a high value domain name into a money-printing website, but you don’t have the stones to put up your own money or finance it, maybe the domain parkers aren’t the stupid ones after all?

This is a bit tongue in cheek, as a few of my developer and SEO friends have recently jumped in and bought some great domain names to develop.

While you don’t need a great domain name for a great website, you will certainly make it much, much easier to make money with advertisers and achieve higher search engine rankings (again, if you owned a coffee house, would you rather be listed on CoffeeHouses.com or FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com?). Additionally, if you do wish to sell the domain and website, an investor will pay much more for the website with premium domain name.

Since one can only spend a certain amount of hours per day developing a website, its better to spend that time working on a website for a great domain name rather than just an average domain name.