“Kindly unsubscribing” to protecting and growing your business.

I’m on vacation this week and a bit of next week.  In lieu of daily domain auction lists not being provided, I’m sharing some thoughts and a recent experience I encountered with domain names and business in general.

As I prepped for next month’s domain renewals, I encountered a few Austin area cleaning domains. Truth be told, I forgot that I owned the domains.

These names are considered geo-keyword domains, including the city and a keyword phrase.  For the said domains, the keyword phrases are “cleaning,” “cleaning company,” “house cleaning.”

Nevertheless, I checked the type-in traffic for each domain to find they averaged 8 unique visits a day, which is nearly 250 unique visits per month.

What business owner wouldn’t want approximately 250 unique customers visiting their website a month?  That’s right! 250 new opportunities to sell your cleaning services and products to people searching for your business.

The search begins…

I quickly searched Google using the city names and keyword phrases. For each search, I focused on pages three through ten in search results as most people don’t search past page two.

In addition, I added companies that used pay-per-click ads (Google Adwords) because I know they are paying a premium for their ads.

I developed a list of Austin area business owners of cleaning companies with their websites and email contact info.

The email that could change your business…

I emailed a few to offer them the chance to purchase the domains or even lease the traffic from the domain, having the domain name redirected to their primary website.

After all, I don’t have a cleaning business, but why not partner with a company and provide 250 qualified visitors per month, right?

I did receive an email back from one owner, which is the entire purpose of this post. Intrigued by her response, I understand it at surface level.

I understand that we’re inundated with emails selling this and that, but this owner’s response struck a chord. She responded via email, saying, “Kindly Unsubscribe.”

Internet marketing spend versus Domain marketing investment.

What intrigues me the most about this response is that I did some research on her company’s pay-per-click advertising (PPC) spending (which I won’t name to protect her and her company).  I found that the company spends nearly $1.25 per click on monthly PPC ads.

Why does this matter, you ask? Let’s do some quick math using the 250 unique visitors the said domains provide on a monthly basis.

If this company receives 250 clicks per month via PPC ads at $1.25, that’s approximately $315. But if this business owner were to have accepted the $99 per month lease of only one of the domains, then her company would have saved nearly $216 dollars per month.

What’s my point? I’m baffled that she’s willing to “kindly unsubscribe” from growing her business by not securing the most valuable assets and factors to internet search marketing.

The PPC cost for ONE month could register all 6 domains for almost 3 years. That’s almost $12,000 in search marketing savings and nearly 9,000 unique opportunities to convert to customers. You won’t convert all opportunities, but a 2-3% conversion rate is still a nice business to thrive on.

By owning or at least leasing the domain names, it’s possible she could lower her PPC costs, if not eliminate them. In addition, if she owned one or more, the competition would be forced to kindly subscribe to increased PPC and SEO costs to get into and stay in the game with her business.

It amazes me the number of businesses that don’t see the value in owning more than their primary website domain.  Although exact match domains are not what they once were, they hold their value for companies that are legitimately using them not to game search engines with low-quality content.

“Kindly unsubscribing” from the tangible value of domains could very well be subscribing your business to going belly up due to increased marketing and customer generation costs.

I want to hear your thoughts:

What’s your perspective about your business, competition, and the use of domain names to protect and generate more business?