In life you win some and you loose some, the same goes for getting the wrong president elected. I am not talking about the current one, I am talking about the future one in 2008 in the USA. 

Barack Obama has been soaring in popularity lately, especially among the young demographic, one I belong to I suppose by some measure. He’s not a candidate I’d vote for personally: he has no executive experience, and even in the Senate he’s only been around for what, like 3 years.

Obama speaks very well, he has made few mistakes which could be pointed out since he wasn’t around much to make any yet, and he has a catchy slogan for “change.” But I digress, this post isn’t to get you to vote for or against him - one could make a good arguement, or a few perhaps, that any change would be better than what we have now.

Today I noticed a domain name being dropped from auction on GoDaddy’s TDNAM:
Barack-Hussein-Obama.com - so it cost me $5 plus registration fee to get it.

Let me go through a brief excercise as to why I think it was worth the price of a hamburger, as my friend put it, and how I sometimes go about looking at domain purchases.

Disclaimer: I didn’t really go out looking for this domain, I saw it by chance. So keep in mind that the piece is a bit satirical and I don’t really put much value of grabbing Obama domains at all. I just wanted to use it as an excuse to write about how I do some things.

1 - SEO Potential and The Issue of minuses in the domain name

The bad news:
Since there are minuses in barack-hussein-obama.com it’s a sure bet that nobody will be typing this name in naturally. Therefore the type-in traffic is removed, and thus so is a significant portion of what makes a domain’s phrase worth its potential ceiling.

The good news:
On the other hand, a well developed site about Barack Hussein Obama will have no problem ranking very well on search engines such as Google. At time of writing this Google treats the minuses or underscores pretty much the same way as if there weren’t any.

In addition, a long domain name such as this actually works better with minuses in a list of returned results. The minuses make it much more readable for human eye scanning, and your clickthrough ratios will be higher compared to if you used the same domain without minuses. This is why you see many ads to the right of Google searches pointing to URLs with minuses or underscores in them so often.

2 -  The Demand and the Purpose

Since this domain isn’t one that can be used as a brand, I am only left to wonder two things:

Does it have niche appeal to a person or company sometime down the road?

In this instance I would say no. There are too many combinations of this phrase, and BarackObama.com would be the main candidate for having special appeal to Obama himself.

Are people searching for information on the subject, using these keywords?

That’s a definite yeshere. Take a look at an image from Google Trends comparing the amount of searches people conduct as of late for Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, and Smooth Jazz. I will explain:

I put Smooth Jazz there for my relative comparison. The reason is that it is a keyword combination with trends that I trust and have first have experience with. On SKY.fm which I run, “smooth jazz” is one of the most popular search engine keywords, and we show up usually second for that on Google.

I know that trend, and what kind of traffic this corresponds to - if you do this you should select your threshold trend instead. I have tested this approach many times, where the relative trend will show me what kind of traffic volume I can expect if, and only if, I get to rank into top 4 on Google for that term, or a very similar term.

And that’s a fairly big if when it comes to SEO ranking, depending on your market. However if you are buying a domain in order to resell it to someone, chances are it will be their problem and job to do this, so don’t worry. But if you plan to develop the name yourself, it’s a different story and many posts can be written on this subject separately.

In this example you can see a few things:

a)While I know one can build a business on ranking for Smooth Jazz, it barely shows up here. This is because it is eclipsed by how popular the “barack obama” keyword combination has become. In fact it’s huge, obviously it grows the closer we get to the election and the more of a viable candidate he becomes in people’s eyes.

My estimate is that if you rank #1 for this term now you’ll have 5 to 10 thousand daily visitors looking for that info. That’s a very rough estimate from my experience, sometimes I am conservative. Ranking #2 maybe will get you a few thousand. This is where conversion tips are useful - having minuses in the domain, selecting the title keywords to be what users expect to see, etc. This truly makes the difference whether people will click on you vs another entry in search results.

b) You see that not many searches are done for our direct keyword combo “barack hussein obama” - not many at all in fact. While not ideal it’s not a show stopper by any means because we are still using 2 of the main keywords, while the third is related.

Good search engines will detect that if people search for a subset, and your third word very much factually or historically applies, then it will rank you just as well. This is one of the reasons why the domain aftermarket also values combinations of few words, rather than just single word domains.

But keep in mind that if a competitor in this space has barack-obama.com, all things in SEO being equal he’s probably going to rank better. But all things in SEO are almost never equal, so everything assumes you do your best to pull ahead.

c) The countries that show up the most for these keywords are your most developed nations when it comes to online advertising. That is, if you plan to serve ads, these are exactly the countries you want to see. It means not only you will get traffic, but you will get one which can have a banner displayed for them.

Where as if you would see Poland, Ukraine, Bolivia without USA also doing well - good luck there! Many networks don’t even serve outside North America, and the ones that do usually do best in North America, then Western Europe, and then you’re mostly out of luck as ad rates drop into the abyss. This will obviously change 5-10 years from now so it might be a good localized domain to hold. But it’s not worth developing in the very near future given other opportunities around, in my own opinion anyway.

3) Potential Development

Ideally I want to get an idea if it is relatively easy to develop the domain. Some topics are hard, while others are easy - but that doesn’t mean one should always go for the simple ones.

If you had a domain such as CanadianLakes.com, just as an example, yes it might be a little harder than usual to spend time to make an informative and professional enough site with this information. That’s a negative.

However on the other hand, if you happen to be or know someone who really does know his stuff, then this becomes even more valuable to you. It means if you develop the site, you can easily become an authority on the subject and in the near future own the traffic that is searching for this information.

So in a way, hard is good as long as you or your buyer is willing to spend the time doing it. It prevents people from entering your space too easily, and this is what makes niche domains also worth their dollar (or should I say Euro at this point, oy wei).

In case of Barack-Hussein-Obama.com I think it is relatively easy to obtain the information. There’s Wikipedia for example to give you a guide of all things you might need to cover, and hopefully you do not scrape. You can hire any starving writer on Craigslist with a half a brain and have him do some research in this area to put together a unique blend of information. Research is there actually, he just have to arrange it, hence why I said half a brain. I also said unique because if you scrape sites chances are you will not rank at all on search engines!

While I am on the subject of Wikipedia, good luck outranking that in Google! In this example you should assume you’re never going to rank #1 with such strong Wikipedia entries. Sure Wikipedia might get favored less by Google eventually, but there will be Knol to take its place instead.

My advice to whoever would develop such an information site, is to try to do it in a unique way. There are too many sites with info on Obama, you need to create something worth talking about, and linking to, if you ever hope to rank. Plain information is not impressive.

I might start with developing an efficient news aggregator, try to become the authoritative place for any breaking news that mentions Obama. If done effectively, it’s a service for Obama watchers. They might link to you because they know you make it easy and focused to cut through the crap and give them straight up Obama news. That’s what DrudgeReport has done for many for news in general - made his own filter that appealed to a lot of people.

Another idea would have an images or gallery section where you easily display interesting photos or videos on Obama. Visual stuff always gets people linking. Got an image of Obama playing with his cat or dog, Obama arguing with a heckler, Obama snorting coke? Oh yeah, that will be worth linking to.

Make sure to have the right balance in your presentation, however. Not all things go together so do research on what kind of things people want to see about Obama out of the people who actually search for him. If you find out that mad raving fans are the only ones searching for him, chances are you don’t want to feature anything that features Obama in any negative light. Remember, you want the natural links, and you don’t have any type-in power with this domain.

Wrap Up

So I hope you found some insight into how I look at some domains to buy interesting.

I will not be developing this domain mysef - I’ve got too many of these. Maybe some day if I have a team that can crank out niche websites within a couple of days dedicated just for this stuff, that would be cool.

But right now for $5 I will just hold on to it. If Barack Obama does not become the President or Vice President, at least that’ll be good news for me personally. On the other hand if he gets somewhere, at least I’ll have a domain name that will rise in value