James: James Schramko here with my buddy, John Lint from 10XPRO.io. Good day, John.
John: Hey, James, how are you?
James: Good. It’s always great to catch up. And we talk about various topics relating to online marketing. You are the founder, and you run a great tool called 10XPRO.io, which is great for building funnels, building memberships, putting products, etc. So, you see a lot of instances being established.
And one topic that’s come up recently for you and for me, is the topic around strategy of how many domain names should we have in our portfolio. And it’s a really interesting one because you’ve got choices here to go for a broad approach or you can go deep. I’ve seen the whole game. I mean, like, hands up, since I’ve been online, I have owned over 2000 domain names but there’s a reason for that. One year, I purchased about 850 domains as an acquisition play to build a portfolio of domain names. And then I used a lot of them to roll into my SEO network. In some cases I was buying 200 domains at a time and building websites on them. We had 1000 websites. I still have a bunch of domains that I sell, but they’re more or less just listed on a broker site, and I sell them for a small profit. So it’s an investment thing.
So putting that aside, there was a stage where I had far too many domains in my portfolio. And I needed a full-time web team just to manage and update them. Because every time you have a website on a domain, you’ve got a commitment to the future in terms of resource or dollars, if you want to keep it live. So where have I got to in the end of all that? I basically have a philosophy, that it’s better these days to build less domains, and to do them well than to try and get all tricky and have too many domains. But I’m interested, what sort of experience have you had, John, with domains and what have you seen work well?
John: Yeah, I think that I did the same thing as you did back in the day. You know, I also have hundreds of domain names. And because one of the very hot strategies back then and it’s still a good strategy from an SEO perspective was you buy a website, or you buy a different domain name that has maybe the keyword in it, you add some awesome content to it, you’re going to get some juice. And then maybe from that, you can link to your main hub, your main site, and then hopefully get that SEO juice. And obviously, you’re creating backlinks, and all of that, right? So that is a strategy that you can use.
So I had a lot of domain names, as well. One of the things that you could do before, and I did as well was, for example, every time I was creating an online course, I was buying the domain name for it. And then I had to install everything to be able to promote that product or build my list about that product or a landing page, I had to then set up the site for that online course. And now I’m live with 10, 20 types of different domain names, different websites, just because I’m trying to sell different courses and it became, just like you, kind of like a nightmare. And then you end up actually hiring someone that you’re going to end up paying probably thousands of dollars just to manage the whole thing, keep everything updated, right?
So with us, when we start to develop 10XPRO, it was with this philosophy of let’s face it, it’s already very hard to build that one online business. You’re going to have to put a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of commitment to be able to build that because, nowadays, just having a website, just like that, it’s just not going to cut it. You kind of want to build that brand, that something, that hub that represents you. Whoever it is using your name or whoever is using like you James, SuperFastBusiness.com, everybody knows that site, it becomes your brand, right?
James: Yeah.
John: And of course, you can sell multiple products off of that one site, right? So that was the idea when we started to develop 10XPRO.io. And that’s why we have this all-in-one solution, where not only do you get all the tools, but it’s now your hub where you can do anything you want. And that’s why we allow you to create unlimited courses, you can sell as many courses as you want. And that’s exactly what all of our members do. You can sell a course about one topic, another course about another topic. You can also create a membership site and bundle things together. It’s pretty awesome for that because now you know that everything is simpler.
One solution, one main brand to build. One area where all your members can just log in and they see maybe their purchases, and they see all of that and they can access everything. This also gives you power as the owner because now you can see the lifetime value of each of your customers, you can see exactly what they have purchased, rather than trying to go do multiple things, oh, is he logged in there? It was a nightmare!
James: It is a nightmare. I’ve lived the dream. You know, I used to have separate websites for my SEO business, my website business, my affiliate marketing business, my membership, my blog, all on separate domains. And then SuperFastBusiness was my general domain that I wanted to start bringing everything in, I brought it all in-house. Now, when I wanted to sell the SEO business, I was able to split it off, give it its own instance and then sell that. Same with the website development.
However, these days, what I’m doing with my 10XPRO install right now is I’ve picked a nice, general domain name. I’m going to load it up with courses information. I’m going to have courses of mine, I’ll have courses for my wife’s business, they’re all going to be under one umbrella domain, kind of like Udemy or something – that similar strategy. One website, one installation where you can put all the things and it’s much easier.
John: And if you have the domain names there that you’ve purchased for all the courses, you can simply redirect them to a page on your website.
James: I think we do that. We have OnlineCourseSystem.com, for example, and people can follow that and it goes to where we want it to go to. That’s simply as easy as buying domain and doing a redirection at the domain registrar for free which sends anyone who types it in. So you can still own the branded search. But I’m a huge fan now, especially, with the changes in SEO, it seems to lend itself to having an authority site anyway. More pages on the site. SuperFastBusiness.com is quite a large site now and it gets a lot of SEO traffic. It’s easier to navigate around the site, like you said, way better for tracking parameters, way better to know your customer value, way better to know your conversion path, better experience for the user, easier for me to talk about.
I used to go to a conference and they say, So James, what do you do? I’m like, well, I got this SEO business, I got this website business, I do a bit of affiliate stuff, I’ve got a membership. Oh, and there’s a podcast. Now, I just say I’ve got SuperFastBusiness.com. I coach business owners, and it’s nice and simple. Simple works.
So our recommendation is unless there’s a very good reason and usually the filter for me is, is it the same customer? If it’s the same customer, run it off one domain, don’t go too niche, go a bit broad. Broad domains – Apple, Google, Udemy, Amazon, Wikipedia, it works. It’s fine. One installation, keep it simple.
I’m James Schramko from SuperFastBusiness.com. John Lint there from 10XPRO.io. We’re here to make things easy for you.
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