IDN Domains Talk

Where dost thou traffic come from Part 2

In part 1 of knowing where your traffic comes from I stated that I have one domain that was getting tons of direct traffic with no clicks at all.
http://www.idntalk.com/domain-names/where-dost-thou-idn-traffic-come-from.html

That domain was parked & all the traffic was suddenly coming since end of February. Currently domains is something that is peaking the interest of tech writers. Some good, most bad because people who don’t own companies believe that everything can be accessed by search. I run search campaigns all day long & know for a fact that if Japanese people accessed sites directly a companies SEM cost would actually go down.

Anyhoot (I know it’s not a word) I discovered that a blogger used my domain as an IDN example in his post & that brought about many people accessing the domain.

So adding to knowing where your traffic comes from

Somebody wrote an article & used your domain as an example.
Now I believe I can pinpoint exactly where my traffic is coming from on my top 20 Japanese domains with traffic.

On another note I see one of my dot coms has gotten up to about 70 uniques a day.
Unbelievable but I count at least 5 sites, yes 5 (maybe more but I stopped looking) sites that named their site after my domain.
One of them named their site closely related to mine & is often referred to as my domain name by people who link to it.
The other 4 sites use my name exactly. Even though the url is completely different.
It’s mind boggling.

Will IDN Domains prove to be new internet business? There is plenty of skepticism about whether or not IDN Domain names are even a necessity. I think all of us that have been working on internet related projects for at least a few years can remember something that we thought wouldn’t work & just shoved it off as a stupid idea.
My experience was the first time I heard someone telling me about selling web space I thought I was looking at a fool. I assumed everything on the net was free. Boy do I wish I started researching things on the net more back then.

Business always changes as technology advances. It may not affect the U.S. but the Domain Name Market in English is very saturated already. What does this leave for the average Japanese business owner or Japanese brand that actually might only be associated with the native Japanese kanji, hiragana, or katakana name? This seems like an option for season internet savvy business owners but the average company creating their first website would not be looking to spend $500 & up for domain name initially from someone.

The solution would be for Japan to turn to IDNs. After the release of the new Vista & Microsoft IE IDNs will be able to be resolved on PCs so there would be no drawbacks for Japan to use IDN domains. When I first started buying IDNs a few months ago I actually didn’t know that IE couldn’t resolve IDNs because I use a Mac. I’m actually glad I didn’t know because initially it might have thrown me off a bit, but after I started to do research on the matter I was able to land a good IDN Domain portfolio that has a very potential profit in a few years.

Now after the new IE is released & people upgrade this is only phase 2. Actually more like phase 2 or 3 because people have already bought IDNs years ago & now a few of the goods ones are being dropped. The next phase though is the general use of IDNs in Asia. I believe this will start next year. There already are web sites & domains in Japan that promote their site name & even business name as native Japanese characters & .com unfortunately not all of them own the IDN version of their site. When people see that they can type in native Japanese it will catch on. If you think it won’t then I’ll prove to you naturally why it will happen.

1. Native Japanese .com’s would be easier to remember for Japanese
2. The availability of good IDN domain names for the average users will be much more available compared to finding a short English .com
3. Japanese cannot read or pronounce everything in English but they can in Japanese.
4. Current English based domain names do not have any extra value for Japanese terms. Keyword domains like car.com or creditcard.com are good because they are easy to remember & also they can be added value in search engine rankings for keywords. A JAPANESE TERM IN ENGLISH HAS ABSOLUTELY NO EXTRA VALUE IN SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS. None at all. Japanese search with native Japanese kanji there is no way to associate it with a domain with English letters, IDNs would create another value in SEO because IDN Domain names can be used in search engine rankings results.

Basically I’m just priming you guys to do your research. After I thought about it. Investing in a small portfolio seemed like the right thing for me. Your portfolio doesn’t have to be Japanese, it could be French, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Greek, or Chinese. I think it will be about 2 years before I can sell off my stock but I’m going to try to hold on to them for 2 or 3 years.