This advice goes against much of what I’ve said about geodomain names during the past couple of years, but hear me out. I am very interested to hear what David Castello has to say about my rationale – and I look forward to his comment, which I bet will happen soon. There is a time when developing a .ORG geodomain is a smart thing to do.

I will preface this by saying that I believe .org domain names are perceived by Joe Interweb as trustworthy, which is what you need for a website. The problem is that many people confuse .org with .com, and if the topic/content is similar, they are likely to just stay on the .com, patronizing the advertisers and making hotel reservations on that site. It’s easy to lose a potential customer due to confusion if you own the .org and not the .com, which is why I think many organizations own their .com, too, and forward traffic to the .org.

In any case, the perfect time to develop a .org geodomain is when the .com is a fully developed business completely unrelated to the city/town/region. If you visit Concord.com hoping to find information about Concord, New Hampshire, you will end up on Computer Associates’ website, and you will scratch your head and say, “shoot, I thought my buddy told me to go to Concord.com to make my hotel reservation. Shoot – what was that address again?  Oh yeah Concord.org!”

If a person is looking for Lowell.org but types in Lowell.com, I hope that my site will give them more than enough information about Lowell, Massachusetts and they won’t even remember that they were initially looking for Lowell.org.

One example of a great .org domain name to develop is a name I am bidding on at Snapnames, but I probably won’t win. Worcester.org is up for auction (August 3), and I think this is a great domain name to develop because of what I said above. I am having a tough time managing 3 geo websites, so I doubt I’d have time to develop this, too – although I will be bidding less than I think it’s worth just in case.

So why is Worcester.org a great domain name to develop? For starters, I have tried to buy Worcester.com with no luck (even with a serious offer). The domain name is being used for its nameservers right now and doesn’t resolve. Worcester is a great city in central Massachusetts that’s home to a professional minor league hockey team, several colleges, many big companies, and is centrally located, making it great for conferences and events. The Worcester Centrum (now the DCU Center) hosts concerts and other events – I remember commercials for the Monster Truck rallies held their annually.

Anyhow, since it doesn’t appear that Worcester.com will be developed into a geodomain any time soon, I think the .org would make a great acquisition.

There are other similar .org domain names that are ripe for development.

Have you ever heard of the famous saying, “the shoe maker’s son has no shoes?” This saying generally means that the cobbler spends so much time repairing the shoes of his customers that he doesn’t have the time to repair his childrens’ shoes. The saying can also be applied to domain developers and designers who have outdated and/or ugly websites.

How can web designers expect to get new customers when their own websites look so horrible and uncreative? With my favorite web designer booked up for a while, I’ve been looking for someone who can fill in just in case I have a project come up (like a creative mini site header for MountainBikers.com as an example if it doesn’t sell for $6,300). I’ve been searching for links on 99Designs, eLance and even Craigslist, and a number of designers’ sites I’ve come across are just bad.

When marketing your services, you need to market yourself first. If you have a crappy website, some people might expect your work to be crappy too. I guess the same goes for domain blogs. If you have crappy domain names, people probably expect your advice to be crappy too LOL

If you happen to know of a good designer looking for a couple small future projects, let me know. I don’t have something right now, but I am always asked about great designers and I am always happy to add someone to my rolodex!

I learned a great way to make money with a generic domain name by forwarding your domain’s traffic to an affiliate url of the website that may be the intended target of some of your domain name’s traffic. I don’t want to say where I learned this because I didn’t ask permission from the domain owner I saw doing this, but I’ve seen it many times and it’s fairly common although I haven’t done it yet myself.

Let’s say you own the absolutely generic domain name BestDomain.com and there happens to be a home cleaning products company that operates on BestDomain.co.uk. You know some of your type in traffic (especially UK traffic) is from people looking for this other website, but since your domain name isn’t  related to the industry in which the other company operates, it would be risky to create a cleaning site without infringing on the rights of the company with the co.uk.

If you park the name, it could piss the other company off that their competitors have a chance to convert this traffic via PPC link, especially because the parking company may display cleaning-product advertisements, which could be considered infringing. Additionally, if people are looking for a cleaning product on BestDomain.com, the conversion rate would be pretty low if you built a domain name-related website.

The next best thing to inquire about is signing up with the other company’s affiliate program, and forward your traffic to the affiliate link. The other company should be happy because they are paying for converted customers, which may have been lost, and you are happy because you are able to make money by giving people what they want with relatively little effort. In addition, if conversion rates are great, the other company may even choose to try and buy the domian name from you.

If you wish, you can also build your own website or company on the domain name, but using a service like ComWired, forward the traffic from the UK to the affiliate link. You can then use your domain name in a way you like, while not losing out on potential revenue from others.

Looks like a good way to generate revenue if you ask me! One caveat I recommend is to speak with an attorney about doing this first to make sure you aren’t violating the rights of the other company, potentially jeopardizing the domain name.