Experimenting with .DE

This week I begin my grand .DE experiment! It is something I’ve been waiting to play-around with a bit more after learning a great piece of information at TRAFFIC in Las Vegas. One of the first sessions at the conference was about ccTLDs so of course I was very interested in the discussion! While I learned a number of interesting things – including that .DE is the second largest Domaining market next to .com (I bet you thought it was .net, .org or .co.uk – didn’t you!) – what really caught my attention is one-month .DE registrations.

I can register a .DE domain name for just one month for about one Euro (about $1.40 USD). This means you can do something very similar to the Domain Tasting early Domainers were able to enjoy. So what’s my strategy here? I’m going to do a bit of type-in traffic scouting using the following method:

  1. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool I will look-up keyword phrases and English and German and pick domains with keywords that have over 1,000 exact-match searches in Germany. Remember – to do this you have to change the options in the Adwords Keyword Tool to indicate that you are targeting Germany.
  2. I will register 50-100 domains/month – thus a maximum of about $140 USD/month
  3. Using a solution like Why Park or SmartNames I will quickly get a website onto the domain. I’m not expecting this to monetize or rank nearly as well as my search engine optimized sites however I do know it will do better than a parked page and all I am looking for here is type-in traffic so SEO doesn’t matter at this stage.
  4. After about three and a half weeks I’ll look at the traffic and if I see a particular domain is getting an acceptable level of type-in traffic – I’ll keep it for another month – if not I’ll let it drop.

After about six months I would hope to have 15-20 .DE domains that I can develop into information sites (in both English and German) that will generate more passive income in the first few months than I spent tasting names! With good type-in traffic and a search engine optimized site I think I can generate some great revenue and expand my .DE investment portfolio.

Feel free to share your own experiences if you’ve done something similar. Of course if you have any questions feel free to ask away!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton