Domain name upgrades, just one word away from skyrocketing earnings!

On May 15, Michael Santiago (Michael Santiago) published a compelling story about how domain names allowed him to personally amass a seven-figure income and ultimately net an eight-figure income for his business partners after selling his business to a NASDAQ-listed company. The story focuses on his process of upgrading the domain name i-newswire.com to newswire.com and his own journey.

Michael is an entrepreneur with over 26 years of online business experience. A pioneer in the field of domain name acquisition and development, Michael currently leads OnlineBusiness.com, a company focused on educating more founders about the transformative power of the right domain name for their business.

The following is an excerpt to better convey the author's point of view:

"If there's one thing I've learned over the past 26 years in the online business, it's this: premium domain names have the potential to bring in more revenue for you and your company!

The first time I changed my life by selling a domain name was in 2004 when I sold Myblog.com for $400,000.It was an exciting time and I knew at that moment that domain names were very powerful.

Building I-Newswire.com

After the sale of Myblog.com, I built I-Newswire.com. This success gave me some time and freedom to explore different online businesses and in 2006, I spent $35,000 on two online businesses. One was I-Newswire.com (the other was GetBlogs.com), and even though it wasn't the largest domain name, I knew that someday I could eventually rebrand the business.

When I bought I-Newswire.com, it was generating about $1,000 per month. Over the next few years, I let it run on autopilot, using the site primarily to link to my other sites. But by the end of 2009, I started working on some side projects and eventually realized they were dead ends.

In 2010, I decided to go all in on I-Newswire.com and completely revamp the business.

I wanted ongoing revenue and the easiest way to do that was to add a subscription feature that would allow users to submit monthly subscriptions. So I hired a developer and we successfully implemented it and after almost 3 years, by 2013, it was generating over $20,000 in monthly revenue.

I was 34 years old, about to get married and wanted to take a break to travel. So I decided to sell the company.

Upgrading to Newswire.com

In February 2015, we acquired Newswire.com and we finally dropped the "i" from I-Newswire.com. We did it, and the best domain name for our business is our own, and we're really excited about it.

Since we switched to Newswire.com, our business has grown rapidly and our revenues have started to go up; in 2015, we had revenues of $891,866.

But something crazy happened the following year. Our revenue more than doubled to $2,407,107.

A small change that made a big impact

The leader in press release distribution at the time was PRNewswire.com, and because our domain names were similar, many people mistook us for them, which probably worked in our favor. Users saw us as the leader, when in reality we were just the upstart.

Continued success and eventual exit

In 2017, our revenue jumped to $3,611,587 and then continued to increase to $8,219,222 until 2020. It was at that point that we began to consider selling the company, mainly because the business was worth millions of dollars.

I never thought I would be in PR forever. We'd been working together for seven years now, and I initially expected myself to work for five years at most. We were both eager to get out of the industry.

In 2021, after the epidemic, I was ready for something new. So I was ultimately happy to sell my stake to Mike for millions of dollars.

Mike spent another year and a half building the business before selling it to NASDAQ-listed Issuer Direct for a staggering $44 million.

Why Premium Domain Names Matter

As you can see from the story above, Michael Santiago chose his domain name very wisely, upgrading I-Newswire.com to Newswire.com, successfully capitalizing on the massive amount of traffic from the news industry leader at the time, "PRNewswire.com". The real losers were the news companies that used the PR+Newswire domain name combination "PRNewswire.com". Perhaps they thought they had enough influence and didn't care if traffic was diluted. This is very wrong. One way users recognize a brand is by its domain name. Newswire.com is definitely an industry model when it comes to domain name selection, going from a company with $1,000 a month in revenue to a $44 million company 15 years later. To being sold 15 years later for $44 million dollars to a NASDAQ listed company. This kind of transformation towards wealth freedom is something that many people dare not imagine. If you have a vision for your company, but don't own a quality domain name, you could be losing millions of dollars, as well as trust and reputation within the marketplace.