Aaron Wall on Branding

Aaron Wall has a very reassuring post for brand marketers who own their branded domain:

clipped from www.seobook.com Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding.  If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you.  They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results.  They can show at most a few ads before they list your site, or they degrade their user experience. And, as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases.  Brand building is nothing they could ever really penalize, as they have no reason to want to penalize companies for creating real brands.

Seth Godin actually said something similar recently, to the effect of "Buy a great domain and build a business around it."  John Caples, the direct mail guru who wrote the classic book "Tested Advertising Methods" used to say this over and over: The first secret of building a great business is to find a starving crowd.  Domains are the first bit of marketing, according to Seth.  A great pre-qualifier of the right buyers -- and a great dis-qualifier of the wrong ones.

My sister is a rubber stamping freak and has a wonderful blog called Barefoot Stamper.  Turns out, stampers are a very rabid subculture.  On just one of her blog posts, she got 64 comments!  I have been blogging at marketing headhunter for three years and that has never happened to me.

So last week I paid a tidy sum for the domains "CardOfTheMonth.com" and "CardOfTheWeek.com."  I was very surprised they weren't already owned by Hallmark.  Just goes to show you why it pays to surf BuyDomains.com.

So guess what business/hobby my sister and I are going to start?