Here’s the biggest problem with domainers – they go crazy and buy all the domains.
You can buy all kinds of .com domains or .club domains, to reserve or build-out.
The big issue is this: just because you have a domain doesn’t mean that you have a business. We have to put a national business behind it or tie it to an existing business.
What you’re doing when you hold a Clubhouse room – as Dr. Chris Colgin from San Mateo, CA did a week ago, talking about how chiropractors can integrate ChiroThin – is creating content.
From there, it’s fantastic to cross-post and repurpose into your .club domain, because the .club domain should be the interactive community companion to the live Clubhouse conversations that are in the rooms, which eventually leads to a club that you built when you apply for a club.
What most people are missing is that you can buy the name. You heard about the domain .club yesterday – how some of these folks were early, and they bought thousands of domains and turned around and sold them for a few hundred dollars each. They have different tools to put up landing pages and just sell them, and that’s great.
Mostly, domainers make money by squatting on the value of a high-level name. Someone mentioned that they had maths.com, but they also had maths.club. Because of COVID, maths.com became very valuable as an e-comm play. Of course, the .club domain is valuable, but it’s going to cost much less than the premium domain – maybe 1/10th or even 1% of the cost.
If it’s a premium domain worth a hundred thousand dollars, you might be able to get the .club for a thousand and build it up in referrals, community, conversational, mid-funnel plays that can refer to the .com or do anything to the .com, or to your practice, for example.
That’s to build a network. Anyone who’s doing a Clubhouse should be constantly referring people to the .club because, otherwise, there are only two other ways to get people anywhere.
One is a link in their bio, which works on either Twitter or Instagram. They don’t allow that. They don’t allow linking.
And the second thing is the live mention. You saw that I did a live mention, which got us a hundred or 200 people. We just got flooded with all these people. Notice it wasn’t a landing page, though – it tells people to put it in an email.
Or we could mention the .club. The meaning of the .club is it’s also basically a vanity URL. You could say Dr. Chris holds it – go visit me at drchriscolgin.com. So why would I do a .club?
Because the .club is meant to be the Clubhouse version of it. Instead of drchriscolgin.com/clubhouse, it’s just easier to use a vanity domain.
It’s the same thing you use with TV and radio, where you have a domain that is a tracking domain or a landing page for a particular offer or particular community.
Chiropractors build communities, and that’s how they bridge value out of Clubhouse.
It’s one thing to be on Clubhouse, and make connections and say, “Oh, look, there’s Shawn Dill, and we’re talking live.”
But if you want to drive measurable value, a .club companion is the thing to really monetize and collect community. Live networking is great, but you can make a clear case because you have the community already. You are driving sales, you can ask them to show ROI in a .club, which no one’s ever done yet on Clubhouse.
It’s the equivalent of the .com land grab 25 years ago or 30 years ago. Remember, these guys are saying the .club is bigger than the .com trap. I don’t think so, but I could be wrong – I still think it’s valuable because they don’t want to have to dump.
Let’s have something – even if we just have a nothing page right now, and all of a sudden it’s worth something, and it’s nice. It can be indexed by the search engine. It doesn’t mean there’s a lot of content. At least we have something there that at least starts the clock on Google.
Google basically penalizes brand-new websites. A lot of people will say that there’s the sandbox penalty, meaning they’re put in a sandbox for a certain amount of time because we don’t know if it’d be spammy or whatnot.
The point is, if you’re a new site, you do have some sort of penalty attached to you. So by having this idea that, “Oh, there’s actually something here. We used to start the clock, this domain in a completely brand new suite. If you sit on it for six months, at least you can say, okay, this site at least started six months ago.”
I think of it more as real estate. Imagine that you were in San Diego before it became San Diego, and it was just farmland. You wanted to buy all of this farm, then you get the department for cheap, but then 40 or 50 years later, all of a sudden they’re going to put a shopping mall and buildings. That real estate becomes more valuable later – which is the whole point behind this.
That’s what domainers do. They buy all the real estate believing that it might be valuable.
One day, it’s turning around, and other people would say we can monetize it because we can put a big sell on the .club, but then both of those guys are wrong – because the short-term people are going to treat the .club like a .com.
Why would you have two competing, conflicting properties?
There needs to be something different about the .club – it’s not just about doing all the .club stuff, because it’s the hot new thing, and you need to grab your name, or otherwise someone’s going to grab your name, so it’s an insurance-protected preemptive kind of right.
Neither of those extremes is correct.
I believe the correct approach is that you have the three stages of the funnel, but where do consideration and conversion come in? Clubhouse has become popular because it doesn’t have permanence, because of the loud conversation and networking, and the fact that they don’t have video.
It allows me to focus on the quality of the conversation, which drives people in for the quality of the network and the conversation. That’s the crack in ‘Crackhouse.’
It’s just like a relationship. We meet someone for the first time – you go on a first date, you have kids, and then they get married. There’s the progression of the depth of that relationship.
The next step in the relationship is to get people to a community site on your property.
That was my post that was on digitalmarketer.com a couple of days ago, about how the shift in 2021 is to move from rented property to owned property. Clubhouse is a rented property. They could shut it down. They could shut you down.. It’s great, and everyone’s there – the reason everyone’s there is that there’s never enough.
You’ve got to get their email address. You have to get them to your website. That way you have control. We’re on rented land. They can take it away from you.
So when you have it on your site, then the next logical continuation step is – how do I build community, share knowledge, and preserve the ethos of why people were hanging out with me on Clubhouse?
It’s because I’m sharing these certain things, because I have the knowledge, because I want to help out, because this is what I stand for, and this is what I can help with. This is my strategic ask, and this is my strategic gift. That then allows people, mid-funnel, to decide, do they want to get on a call with me?
Because they want to lose some weight. They want to stop by my clinic. They want to buy my products. They want to do something that’s at the bottom of the funnel.
So I consider the .club site mid-funnel – which means if we talk about why, how, and what, it’s more about how. If you’re talking about awareness, consideration, or conversion, it’s a consideration.
Mid-funnel websites are mainly around buying things, and that’s why .com is ‘com’ for ‘commercial,’ as in people buying and selling things. So if you try to jump from a first touch where they know who you are straight to a sale, some people may buy, but I think most people will be turned off by that. Most people trying to use the .club to sell something.
So let’s say that I’ve found diapers.club – a major premium domain, and I just started selling. I put up a shopping cart. I put Shopify up on diapers.club.
What do you think that will do?
It might do well because you could sell it to whoever is selling Pampers or something, but to all the people it’s not because you have to build a community before you can get people to buy. If you don’t have authority and parenting and kids and these sorts of issues, you don’t have the ability to drive traffic. So then the .clubs were nothing, even though it’s a premium domain.
What people are missing is, if you drive traffic and engagement and awareness and community and whatnot in Clubhouse, then your companion .club domain is going to add an extra 30 or 40% value to that because it allows you to capture. Now you can continue the conversation.
If you don’t do that, then you have to keep doing Clubhouse rooms – which is great, you should still continue doing that – but you have no way to continue that conversation. You have no way to progress people through the funnel.
Then the only way to do that is live conference speaking, which is what Clubhouse is, or manual, ‘hit-me-in-the-DMs’ kind of stuff, which is great for partnerships – but we’re getting customers to provide things.
You need to have some level of automation. That’s what we want people to understand.
