LinkMoney.org

Do you want to be a Domainer? Or perhaps you just want to do some keyword research on a domain name for your personal Blog. This post will help you.

Do you own a couple or more of domain names that you purchased when you had a brainfart? Do you have several domains parked just waiting for the chance to get the time to set up websites and become the next Darren Rowse?

Well I wish I only had a couple, but truth is I have over a hundred, with only a little over a dozen that are activated and in various states of growth at the moment.

Did you know that there are large numbers of people that invest in domain names? I had suspected so but after searching around a while I was floored with the enormity of this Domaining business. There are worldwide auctions in fancy places that attract the high rollers, the champagne and caviar set, and from the podcast auctions I have heard the former had been liberally doled out.

Here are just a few Domains that sold in 2007 with prices realized; computer.com, Five million dollars, seniors.com 2.1 million, vista.com 1 and a quarter million, guy.com 1 million, ok you say, so what, I’ll never have that chance?

Well how about DIY.net $200K, BoiseIdaho.com $175K, travel.info $116K, bulk.com $100K. It is not exactly too hard to come up with something close that has not yet been purchased. Buy something you think is cool, sit on it a while and offer it for sale. My father always said, “If you double your money, you’ll never go broke.”

Even any commonly used terms, dictionary word one name urls, three or four character urls sell for many thousands of dollars. All of the dot com LLL or LLLLs have been sold, but they do show up in the expired or after market sites quite often. One man last year purchased five LLLs for less than $3,500 from a domain holding company that released them on the aftermarket at a very low price. The blog at www.dailydomainer.com says he could easily sell them for $50K any day! Three years ago I purchased three LLLLs for one of my websites and use two of them as redirects to the first. If I had only known then what I know now I would have purchased as many LLLs and LLLLs that I could afford.

This means that someone was quick on the draw and was able to scoop up these choice names whenever they became available for the first time, or perhaps a few years later when the original owner neglected to renew them. That happened to me once on a domain that I had been using and then had transferred the website over to a nice easy four letter dot com but I had still left the old name active and it pointed to my new site. Well I had moved around several times in a five year period and between postal and email changes the renewal notice never got to me. Next thing I knew the old address was gone and there was nothing I could do about it.

I suppose I could have contacted the new owner and tried to negotiate a repurchase, but as I was only using it as a redirect I decided to heck with it. Lesson learned. It will never happen again.

You all no doubt know that the age of your website, among many other factors, does help to improve your ranking with some of the search engines. So keep track of all your domains and make sure they are renewed far in advance. I keep all of mine in a spreadsheet database and I also keep adding the new purchases as I build this collection.

I look at domain names as falling into two categories, a Brandable Name, and a Keyword Name. Seems like in the early days of the Internet it was a scramble to come up with cute names that might be an acronym of your business name or that just was memorable for its bizarreness. Consider names like YAHOO, GOOGLE, EBAY, There certainly would not be anyone apt to search for those terms, however they have become Brand Names and easy to remember. Google has even become a verb!

Then we come to the type that many people look for today, as being search engine friendly. For instance you want the Keyword or Keyword Search Phrase to be built right into the domain name. Some of the search engines use the url line in the search algorithm and then the title bar of the website’s internal pages becomes an associated part of the search strength. For instance www.LookingForMr.com might be followed by Blog page headers of Goodbar, or Handsome, or Right, or Fixit. The words in the title pages become what are called the Long Tail Search Words.

The domain name and the long tail are not the only factors involved in having your site found, there is of course content, links in, social bookmarking, Buzz, and many other details, but the names do help. Oh, and did I mention content?

If you are a Blogger in the world of Internet marketing or niche marketing specifically, then it would most likely behoove you to purchase a domain name that might be easily related to the product that you are humping and certainly if you can get the product theme in the url line than that is a plus.

Let me tell you the procedure I use to investigate the availability and the possible demand for certain terms that might make a good domain name. Others no doubt have their own method, but this works for me.

I use a pc almost exclusively with Firefox. Other computers and browsers might have some or all of these features available, but I do not know about them. Firefox allows you to add many different tools or utilities that they call Addons. One of the newer Addons that you can install on Firefox is LinkBun.ch (note the TLD of ch) and what this tool does is to allow you to open up as many tabbed websites that you wish and then create one LinkBun.ch bookmark. That way the next time you want to open that same series of websites all at once is to go to your bookmarks and open that one LinkBun.ch. It is still in Beta but I have not found any flaws in it, other than you have to say yes about an annoying three times to get it to open. Still pretty cool.

So here is what I have for my Domainer LinkBun.ch. I open the following list of tabbed websites:
http://www.google.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com
http://www.pcnames.com
http://wwwfreshdrop.net/index.php
http://www.archive.org/web/web/php
Then I create a LinkBun.ch out of that group, save it to bookmarks and then any time I want to use this group of pages they are right there. All of these sites are free to use. There are subscription services and software that you can purchase that will do a much more accurate job but the free ones are good enough for me for now.

If I already have an idea for a good name and want to see if it is available I go right to pcnames. This one has a block where you just start typing the name in and pcnames lets you know if any of the names are available instantly right as you are typing in characters. So I just used the example above; lookingformr and started typing them in. As I got to “looking” all are taken, but org and biz are for sale, then as soon as I started adding additional characters, “f” & “o” available, “lookingfor” are all taken but org and info are for sale, then added the “mr” and surprise! They are all available! The dot com, net, org, info, biz and us are the TLDs that pcnames returns. They do qualify the results by saying that the data might not be entirely up to date, but I have only seen one time that I went to register a domain that pcnames said was open to find that it had been already registered.
Another nice feature with pcnames is that if the website is taken there is a WHOIS button right there so you can check and see who the owner is. Normally the owners are cloaked behind a privacy shield, but sometimes you can find the name and address of an actual owner.

Before I register the name I check the keyword url in wordtracker and Google within quotes. That will give you some idea of the popularity of that specific search phrase. If no one or very few people ever search on that phrase then I do not buy it.

Freshdrop.net – TDNAM Closeouts are names that have been in service before. Many have fair Google Page Rank, age and traffic. These dropped names usually have just recently expired and the registrar gives you a chance to pick up a domain with some ready made juice. There is a filter box where you can select any number of TLD’s or all if you want. Here you can register a great many TLDs that you normally do not see at most domain registries. For instance besides the customary dot com, net, org, biz, info and us, you can also search for dropped dot mobi, tv, name, cc, ws, de, am and fm.

The filter box also lets you put other limiters in your search, such as starts with, contains, ends with, insert a number for minimum GPR, select whether the GPR might be fake or not, and insert a minimum age in years.

I generally look for names that have a minimum GPR of 2, age of 2, not fake, [mykeyword] and am often surprised that there is something right down my alley for a mere five bucks! There is no guarantee that the page rank or any juice will follow you when you revive this turkey, but hey the age has to be a plus factor.

I suspect that GoDaddy is behind just about everything here, but I don’t know that for sure. Every time I have registered from Freshdrop it has been GoDaddy on the other end of the line. Oh by the way you will have to register through GD to obtain an annual TDNAM account to be able to purchase any of these TDNAM domains. As I recall it was less than five bucks for the annual renewable account. The other thing is that in addition to the $5 purchase you have to pay an additional $9.95 for a one year registration fee, plus .20 ICANN fee, so it’s a little over fifteen bucks for this baby.

There is another section called “Exp Names,” these are expired and available at auction. The minimum bid is usually fairly low, and you can see the number of bids on each domain name. You could get lucky and pick up something that you could promote for as little as $10, however they usually sell for a bit more, sometimes in the hundreds.

There is also a section for SEDO Auction, Ebay, Afternic and others, but they almost all sell in much higher prices and I only look for bottom of the barrel bargains. I know that it would be smarter to purchase a better name, but I can’t afford it on a gamble and I know for sure I can do something with the low priced names I do get. This Freshdrop site reportedly gets updated on an hourly basis.

If you want to see what the website used to look like before, that’s where I use the page that we opened with LinkBun.ch for www.archive.org. This site has a feature called “The Wayback Machine,” and you can see what the site used to look like at various dates in the past. You should keep that in mind when you plan on restarting this domain. Will its previous iteration help you or be a hindrance?

GoDaddy also operates a site at www.tdnam.com where you can purchase high priced domain names. I see things like cavemenblogs.com being offered for $50K minimum, theguypage.com with one bid at $35K, adsensewebsites.com for $950, and so on. Oh you can pick up the bargain presedenthillaryclinton.com for a mere $1,000, note the misspelling, but hey what about 2012?

Why would you buy these and then not do anything with them, you might ask? Well I do intend to use every one of them eventually. There are just too many things going on in my life to keep installing new websites every day. So what I do is park them. Some places charge you a monthly fee for parking, like GoDaddy, but I park mine at namedrive.com for free.

That way a fake website is created with that url and it looks like a website full of information, but they are all ads. Well if someone blunders on to that site and clicks any of the ads or makes a purchase, then you get a share of the advertising revenue. Hey I would rather get a couple of bucks every once in a while, then to just keep them hidden. I doubt the website gains any ranking but it should qualify as helping in the ageing of the website. Then when you do want to get it set up all you have to do is transfer it back and install your website.

Just as much as GD is no doubt the best known and I do register many domains with them, they are not my favorite. I think that BlueHost is the very best hosting company out there, particularly for customer support. So I quite often pay ten bucks for a domain through BlueHost just because I like this company so much.

Very big changes are coming and I have no idea, nor have I read any of the experts predictions yet, but the Domaining world is about to change within the next couple of years. ICANN this year at the Paris meeting voted to allow any type of name to be registered. You can create any kind of new TLD by paying $100,000 to ICANN and then you can become the registrar for the millions of urls that will be set up under what ever you selected. Lets say you wanted dot movie, or dot Ford, or dot catpoop, whatever. A hundred K and it’s yours! The buzz is that this will come into effect about 2010.

I have a hunch that dot com will still reign supreme for a long time to come.
(Oh and by the way if you register the above www.LookingForMr.com please let me know.)

Annotated Terms used in this post:

BlueHost – Ten bucks to register a name, but the very best company to deal with in the way of tech support and ease of use of their website features, in my humble opinion. The hosting that they provide has many free features that comes with it where other companies charge you extra for them, like a shopping cart, large quantities of email addresses, and others.
DNS – Domain Name Service – this is the service that converts your readable character domain name into an IP Address like 208.22.38.109, or what ever your name converts to.
Domain – The name of the url
Domainer – a person that owns several domains, either for eventual use or to hold for resale at a later date.
GoDaddy – Domain name registrar and hosting company. They are probably the cheapest registrar. Their website is very confusing and they are always trying to sell you something more. I have nothing personally against GD other than the confusion I previously mentioned, however as I was writing this today on the Fourth of July one of the Blogs that I subscribe to in my reader, webmaster-source.com, came out with a story about horror stories with this registrar/hosting company. You might want to read it and come to your own conclusions.
http://tinyurl.com/5dmmoc
GPR - Google Page Rank.
ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
LLL – any three letter domain name.
LLLL – any four letter domain name.
TLD – Top Level Domain (like com, org, net, etc.)
TDNAM – The Domain Name After Market.
URL – Universal Resource Locater.
WHOIS – A place to look up the name and contact address for the owner of a domain. Most are hidden behind a cloaking registrar site, but several will have the actual name and address of the owner.

OK readers, here comes my personal request. If you have found this article of interest, or helpful in any way, I REALLY would appreciate some feedback, comments, links in, social bookmarks, or any type of input at all. This is a fairly new website and I really need to get some traffic. Thanks. Rich Hill