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Remember back in school when you learned how to spell? It almost went hand in hand with the “Don’t color outside of the lines!” attitude. It was something you were expected to do - color within the lines and spell correctly.

You lost points for bad grammar, incorrect spelling, and oh yes, coloring outside the line.

If you consider words as a business commodity, correct spelling is usually put up for sale and purchased by those of us who are eager to devour it through magazines, novels, books, newspapers, membership sites, and all kinds of downloadable online content. To name but a few outlets.

So, what happens to all the incorrect spelling? Where does it go?

You would think that most of it gets stomped upon and eradicated in the classroom, or by the magazine or book editor, or even the newspaper editor. And, for the most part this ib, oops, is true.

Yet, with the dawn of text messaging, instant chat rooms, email, and a host of other “who cares how I spell” applications, incurrect speling is becuming the informal norm.

So, who cares if you spell incorrectly?

Well, despite what your teacher told you, there are people who actually want you to misspell - in fact, they’re counting on it!

Entrepreneurs like Kevin Ham from Vancouver get excited when you absent-mindedly type in prpsi.com instead of pepsi.com. Try it. The ‘r’ key is so close to the ‘e’ key on the keyboard that people mistakenly type the ‘r’ key instead.

So, how much money can you make from spelling errors?

According to the June 2007 issue of Business 2.0 magazine, Ham’s business is worth over $300million, with much of it coming from owning misspelled domain names that people type directly into their Internet browser address windows.

In 2004, Yun Ye sold his portfolio of 100,000 domain names for $164million.

Mark Schilling owns over 320,000 domain names and still works out of his home in the Cayman Islands.

In 2006 Ham hashed out a deal with the government of Cameroon in Africa - who have the ‘.cm’ country code (U.S.A. has .us, Canada has .ca, and the U.K. has .uk). Why? Many people who intend to type “.com” as part of a web address end up missing the ‘o’ of com and type .cm instead.

Surfers who make this mistake end up on the Cameroon servers where the name is checked to see if it is registered there. If not, the surfer is redirected to agoga.com, which Ham claims to have upwards of 8 million unique hits per month.

So, how is the money made?

For the most part, these sites contain simple “park” pages containing money-generating pay-per-click ad links that relate somewhat to the keywords used by the searcher. Each time the visitor to the page clicks on a link, the site owner makes money from that click (pay per click).

Other ways these “domainers” make money is from buying popular names like greeting.com and adding a park page to it.

Other than joining this bandwagon, one way you can profit from this with your site is to consider different, or even incorrect spellings people would use to access your site. Then figure what the most common mistakes would be and register those sites, and have those sites redirect to you main site.

So, next time someone corrects your spelling you can tell them about Kevin Ham.

Happy domain naming!

To Your Success
Cody Moya

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