Choosing names. This is where the game is won or lost...and it happens before you even step on
the playing field and hand over your credit card number for those first domain registrations!
It is amazing how many people jump into this business without doing any research to find out whether or not
there is even a remote chance their names will sell (or earn revenue from traffic or affiliate arrangements). They just start
registering names because they like the way they sound. I know because that's what I did when I started!
It was a costly mistake. I bought hundreds of domains the first few months I was in the business, but didn't
make a single sale until five months after I started (and that sale was for peanuts). It took that long before I finally learned the answer to
the question I should have asked the first day I arrived. That is "Who are the buyers?" If you don't
know who they are, there is no way for you to know what they want.
The vast majority of money from domain sales and advertising revenue comes from businesses who are interested in
only one thing - selling their product or service. So guess which domain names are in highest demand? If you said names that
describe a commercial product or service you get a gold star (and a head start on all of those people like me who foolishly dove in head
first from the high board without knowing my pool of potential buyers was so shallow I was sure to get hurt when I hit the
water).
Fortunately you can easily avoid making the same mistake. There are free tools out there that
will help you measure the potential of a domain before you buy it.
When I found out about those tools and started using them, my business blossomed and I went on to
sell hundreds of domains and build a portfolio of keepers that earn a steady income from selling the traffic that comes to
those domains to advertisers.
Here are some of the tools you will want to use and a brief description of what each tool will tell
you (I want good results from most or all of these tools to be confident the domain I am looking at has a good chance to be a winner):
Overture Suggestion Tool - When you put a
word or term in the Overture search box it will tell you how many times people searched for that term in their system the
previous month (Overture is Yahoo!'s advertising network). I get interested if the word returns 10,000 or more because
it tells me a lot of people are interested in the name I entered, indicating a strong demand for the product or service. A
lower number wouldn't necessarily rule the domain out. Other tools may tell me that a word or term that only returns 2,000
in Overture has some other valuable attributes that still make it worth buying. Keep in mind
that Overture combines the results for plural and singular searches. So if you enter the word "home" the
number returned would cover searches for both "home" and "homes" which sometimes makes it tricky to determine if a singular
or plural word is as strong as the number indicates.
Overture is also relied on very
heavily by domainers looking for traffic. If you type in the word or term with the extension (for eample, "shoes.com" instead
of just "shoes"), you can get a pretty good idea whether or not the actual domain is getting traffic. Someone will register virtually
any domain that returns a number in Overture with the extension. Where 100 without the extension should be a sign to move on, 100
with the extension will draw a flood of competing buyers. This tool does not return accurate results for domains
with hyphens.
Google - The popular search engine is a good tool to use for checking
word/term popularity. Since the number of Google pages returned is simply an indication of how many pages contain the word, use
some common sense here. It is most useful for product/service nouns, surnames, city names (smaller cities since large city names
are obvious buys), etc. I like to see a million pages or more, but a half million might be fine if other tools point to
value. When your search includes more than one word be sure toenter it in quotes, like
"domain name" for instance, otherwise you will get inaccurate results for the term.
NetCheap.com (and many other registrars) - I also like to check whether or not an
available word/term has been taken in other major extensions (for me that would be .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and
my country code - .us). I prefer to see the word I go after be gone in all of the other major extensions as that lowers the
odds of the buyer considering an alternative. If they are all gone it is also another indicator of how much interest there is in
that word or term. You can check which extensions are available at most major registrars. I happen to use NetCheap to do
this because it has a compact easy to read screen that shows what has been taken.
View Bids tool - Another Overture tool that will tell you what advertisers are
currently bidding for a word or term. Just as important as knowing which words are most popular is knowing which words have the
highest bids on them. If advertisers are bidding $2 per click on a word it could make a considerably more
valuable site than a word that has a top bid of 10 cents.
Information from the latter tool is especially important if you decide to develop some of your domains
yourself. You are likely to earn more from an advertising program for web site publishers (like Google AdSense or Yahoo!
Publisher's Network) if the word has a higher pay per click value. For example, it is not uncommon to earn $4 a click from a casino
advertiser. You would need 40 clicks to earn the same money from a site built on a word that advertisers only pay 10 cents a click
for.
There is a much more in-depth discussion of these tools and many others that
you will want to use in a Cover Story I wrote for DNJournal.com called Tools of the Trade: Free Resources That Will Help You Identify Domains That $ell. I
strongly urge you to read the complete article because I am convinced you will earn dividends from the information for many
years to come.
Keep in mind that these tools do not gaurantee sales but they will greatly enhance your odds
of buying domains that have a better chance to sell or earn money from advertisers. Sometimes buyers do not surface for
even the best names, but the domain business is all about the odds. If you build a portfolio of carefully selected domains a
certain percentage will sell and the proceeds should be enough to recoup your costs for the entire portfolio
with a nice profit left over.
It's hard to sell something people are not looking for, but some domainers still like "brandable"
domains that show poor results in all of these tools. They believe a company might buy their name and then do a lot of marketing
to build recognition for the name. Those sales do occur occasionally but they are much more of a long shot than names that have solid
search interest built in and that perfectly describe an entire class of goods or services. Again, it is all about stacking
the odds in your favor!
(This article written for NameNewbie.com by Ron Jackson,
Editor/Publisher of DNJournal.com)
