I hate to admit that I spent an absurd amount of time (around 6-7 minutes) trying to figure out the typo of the word "testimonial" before reading the article.<p>The typo isn't a typo rather than a wrong/another TLD. OP's website used ".to" TLD and they bought an ".io" TLD.
Congrats to him! Just playing devil's advocate: what we see here is correlation, not necessarily causation. In other words, we don't know how many visitors who visited the domain with the typo would have realized quickly and then used Google and convert either way.
The only problem with paying $35k for a domain is that you're supporting domain squatters, and giving them seed money to squat more domains. I don't think I'd want to do that, but it's not my money.
35k for io domain seems very expensive.<p>Very surprising that it got that much type in traffic.<p>I could see it being worth it for .com (famously bodybuilding.com cost 35k a long long time ago)<p>Why would people be going to .io instead of say .info, .biz, .dev, .business , .photo, .org, etc?<p>When was the last time you typed in non .com, org, .net domain by hand?
Just a quick question on your traffic / conversion stats.<p>How come you have (almost) as many conversions as you have leads?<p>How do you count these?
I guess there is no way of estimating how much revenue was actually lost on people who typed in the wrong url and then didn't try again?<p>Without that piece of data I'm not sure if one can claim that there was a return on this investment - my assumption being that motivated buyers would still try to find the correct url.
The thing that would be better to know but impossible to tell is - how much was unable to be recouped as a result of picking a boutique TLD for the main site in the first place. Good to know at least some is recoverable though, assuming you hit enough volume.