Sometimes I like to title my posts so illogically that you will question whether or not I know the first thing about SEO.

Anyhoo, today I’m going to talk about .CM domains. You may remember a famous domainer by the name of Kevin Ham who traveled to the distant land of Cameroon to basically swoon the Cameroonian government and monopolize the .CM TLD. Well, as of just recently, .CM domains are now up for grabs for everyone.

In case you haven’t already figured out the appeal of this TLD, it gets a ton of typo traffic due to hasty web surfers that miss the “o” key when typing in .COM addresses. It’s safe to say that Google.cm, Yahoo.cm, Facebook.cm, etc, get a hefty amount of erroneous hits per day. There are also non-trademarked typo domains you could snag if you put your brainstorming cap on and do a little research.

The Catch
These exotic domains don’t come cheap. I just registered a .CM domain (that I’m quite happy about) with Namecheap, and it cost me $104/year. I’ve already started to accumulate a text file filled with other .CM prospects that I may or may not register. This could get dangerous.

Namecheap offers free privacy with .CM registrations, so that’s nice. Especially for those of you planning to snag some trademark domains.

Before You Register a .CM Domain with Namecheap!
Check out this important info I got from a Namecheap representative:

If you register new .CM domains during open enrollment (starting Wed, August 26, 2009 at 5:00:01 PM PT) be sure to pre-configure the domain to use custom nameservers at the time you register the domain. You cannot change DNS after it is registered. Please see the CM FAQ page for more details. The Registry will eventually allow DNS changes in future (estimated to be early in 2010), although the Registry will charge for DNS updates. The use of eNom nameservers is a free service for our direct clients. You can make any changes to your host records, such as URL or email forwarding, by going into the domain control panel (Domains > My domains).

As far as other registrars, I have no idea what the policy is. I remain loyal to Namecheap.

Last night on the Wickedfire Ventrilo server, myself, Eli, Enigmabomb, and a couple others (who do not have blogs to the best of my knowledge) did some intense .CM gold-panning. We found some pretty interesting available domains.

Eli found and snagged the best one. That jerk.

Have fun.