Great Domain Name - Worth the Investment?

If you seek to build a high quality affiliate site and your primary marketing vehicle is going to be SEO, is a good domain name (e.g. [keyword].com or [keyword].info) worth the hefty investment it would require to obtain it?

It woul of course have a "cool" factor and I always prefer better branding, but I don't know that I can really afford radio or TV advertising ... it'll mostly just be online. In which case .. I wonder how important a domain name really is ... in search engines, it seems like most just click on a link depending SERP position and title.

So, is it worthwhile to spend the money to buy a great domain name

Thanks.

It depends on the competition and how you name the business. Directories, a good source of link popularity, generally list he site under the business name. A [keyword].com site would then still have to compete with the established players.

If the competition has optimized buying word pages and 300+ links, you still have your work cut out for you!

ditto yellowwing. Great domain names I feel are invaluable to help differentiate you from the sea of competition. Put yourself in the searchers shoes, if searching for widgets, and you're presented with abcwidgets.com, abc-widgets.com, or widgets.com, which one would you click on first? Personally , I believe the one most succinct, descriptive URL describing the item or service being offered is the best. Also, ask yourself, how much would it hurt you if your top competitor owned that domain name? I still see domain names as real estate. If you can negotiate for Park Place or Boardwalk at "St. James Place" prices, then it's a good investment. Sorry for the Monopoly analogy!

Let me put a number to it. If the [keyword].[tld] domain you wanted was going to cost you k ... is that overkill for an affiliate site? I've heard in this particular niche that affliates can make decent money but my best experience to dat is making -2k per month in travel afiliate sites. And frankly, most of that money was generated using mini sites (e.g. [city]-hotels.[tbd]) ...not from direct traffic to the main site, which can a good keyword domain, incedently.

Thanks.

Can't really say that k is too much without knowing the traffic it yields, what your offering, average sales price and avg conversion rate. $2k a month from an affiliate site's impressive. That's an awful lot of couple of buck commissions. Seems you know what you can do revenue-wise, just do the math to figure out your ROI (return on investment).

A good domain is important. But if you pay 2,000 dollars for a domain, on a low budget you could be using that to buy 2,000 dollars worth of links. With a well optimized site, you can get it pretty high ranked no matter what the domain name is (under 20 caracters and with no spam {i.e. travelsexgambling.com}) with 2,000 dollars worth of back links. This would be for non-extremely competitive keywords.

I know it is great to have a good domain, but it shouldn't take up more than 1-3% of your budget, IMO.