So, in the interest of A) learning something (passing along a bit of education to the noobs and the oldtimeers) I'm game for setting aside the rules - for this 1 thread.
Here's the ground rules IF you want to educate others OR brag a bit (show off how savvy you are) OR just want to publicly celebrate - whatever. Just so long as you follow these rules.
1. You get to mention only 1 domain = Your best catch, of a heretofore unregistered domain (you better Archive.org it or I may nuke it) - registered for the 1st time in the last 12 months. Get that: The last 12 months - for the first time (nothing in Archive.org) - because the point is to demostrate that there's still some gold in them thar hills. So, it cannot be a drop caught domain, etc.
2. IF you choose to play you also have to explain the thought process, the research process, the "how I went about it" of how you hit gold. The point it to educate, not promote. And don't even hint about "doing commerce" - selling it, etc..
3. IF I look and see what I - in my sole discretion - think is a "junk" domain, something posted for reasons that look far more promotional than educational, I will unceremoniously yank the post. Don't make me feel bad by having to do that. When in doubt, don't do it. Sticky me if in doubt. Have doubts. It's often wise to question.
4. Preferably domains that are not yet a website, but we'll see.
5. NO HOTLINKS to a domain. No talking about development efforts. The focus is on "how to find good domains in a highly prospected market." When everyone else is looking for nuggest how do you find them?
6. No porn, sex, pills, and any other version of "bad stuff" domain. IF it's not suitable for children it doesn't go here.
7. IF you are a member WITH LESS THAN 25 POSTS to your credit OR IF you are a member for LESS THAN 3 months DO NOT POST in this thread. Unfortunately, I consider you "unseasoned" in the spirit of WebmasterWorld, which may not be accurate or fair, but soon enough you'll be eligible to "play". IF you really really really have some important insight to share, along with a domain, sticky me and we'll talk. Be patient. I'm at work.
So, who wants to explain to the world, in an educational manner, how to go about finding the very best of domains in a world where there are 1000s of people looking AND millions of domains "being tasted" every week?
Show 'em if you got 'em and make it good or make it gone. ;0)
I won't go first but I'll tell ya: There's still some out there.
[edited by: Webwork at 4:49 pm (utc) on Aug. 10, 2007]
This should be fun learning and is not meant as anything other than entertainment. Let's go...
The story: I was already in the head space seeking something that included a certain keyword. I believe you tend to attract domains when actively thinking about them. While doing my "research" I noticed something that was right in my face!
Open up another tab in your browser to play along. Let's go to >> maps.google.com
We have all been there many times before, right? How many people do you think visit that map page?
My dad often said "money is everywhere, you just have to seek it out." Like walking down a crowded city street, I was on the maps homepage just looking at it like a dummy, and doing various searches. Fortunately google planned ahead for dummies like me because if you read above the search bar you'll see they put some gray text there in quotes.
Are you looking above the search bar? See what I see? Do I see a domain buy in those quotes? Is that possible?
Here it comes...........
Look above the search bar...........
See anything that may be domain worthy?
Ok, done teasing............
Domain: HotelsNearLax.com
Registered: 26-Feb-06 for about $6.95
Now, here is where the real fun begins. You may live in a box and not know what "lax" stands for. If that's the case, I'm not telling. For those of you more inclined to travel, lean back, take a breath and think, I'll give you 3 hints... PHX, SFO, JFK.
Ready for more fun? Those 3 letter codes are only one side of the coin, get what I am saying?
Golden nuggets? Maybe not, but are you old enough to remember the RainMans comments on counting cards... "there's lots of them, lots and lots of them."
1. LAX - BIG airport. Lot's of air traffic. Lots of ground traffic too, making getting a room near the airport a good idea. Anyone with any LAX experience knows that getting to the airport can, at certain times, well . . make having a hotel on or near the campus a good idea.
2. Did I say "big". In the world of direct navigation bigger is always better. Bigger = more folks likely to search the topic. Bigger demographic interested in subject = more traffic.
3. Domains with qualifiers - such as "near" - actually get type-in traffic. Maybe not "nearly" as much as others, such as LAHotels or other "closer hits", but often enough or more than enough to pay for the domain+.
4. Hotels near airports also = higher PPC in many cases. LosAngeles? Maybe even better still.
Thanks for posting up.
Next?
Thank you, webwork, for prompting me to get off my ass and register a domain that I was discussing the other day.
I was describing a site (example.com) I am developing to a friend. It's an information/review/community site for a subset of bars and clubs. I told him that one feature of the site will be "bartender blogs", where bartenders working at any of the covered establishments can have individual blogs, not tied to a particular bar (they often work at more than one). I explained why people would be interested in this, and he concurred, saying "bartenders are often minor celebrities to their patrons".
Now, example.com is meant to be a comprehensive site about bars, but not all bars. It's a small, manageable subset. My friend had been encouraging me to develop a more general parallel site. But that could be a lot of work. And the logical, parallel domain name to "go with" my original site (shorter version of the name without a subset qualifier) has been long taken.
When I mentioned the blog feature, my friend said "why not just that?! Why not have BartenderBlog.com? Why, any bartender anywhere in the world could have a blog there. It's easy to remember, and they can put it on their business cards, too. Is that taken?
Yup, it was. Darn.
But BartenderBlogs.com, was available, and has no archive.org history. Better yet, BartenderBlog.com (the one that was already taken) isn't being used for the purpose of hosting blogs of bartenders, so mine isn't a copycat of the un-pluralized one.
I will probably now use this one to host the "bartender blogs" feature of example.com, and possibly develop it out more generally as my friend has suggested. Maybe everything about every bar in the world is too much to bite off. But a blog for every bartender in the world? Sure, piece of cake. ;)
Meets type-in criteria, as well, I'd say. Where would you go looking for bartender blogs if you thought they might exist?
Lesson: it's useful to discuss domain names with trusted friends (who won't register it themselves!). In this case, I wasn't even discussing domain names, but a site I am developing. The domain name was a freebie that came up in the conversation. You just have to listen.
Lesson 2: "blog" and "blogs" are useful suffixes. Ones you'd have thought have already been taken more most every common word. Think again.
Lesson 3: Don't find what you want? Look for the plural. Or not. It might even be a better fit than your first choice.
Lesson 4: Pay attention to your marketing terms. Are any of them useful domain names? Maybe not for the site you're working on just now. It's easy to overlook, once you've got a domain for a project that you are happy with. No reason to think about domain names any more, right? I've been calling a feature of the example.com site "bartender blogs" for months. Never thought of it as a domain name.
But in the spirit of domain buying and developing niche areas of content I've found this particular keyword has worked very well. Last time I checked there was still an abundance of domains available along this line of thinking. In fact, I only bought the "blogs" version of my industry-specific keyword in February of this year. Rolled out some WordPress and sprinkled it with SEO and it's now getting a healthy amount of traffic. That was another $6.95 domain purchase.
When I first got into the game (yes, I'm an amature) I wasn't sure what to do or what to register. I've lurked and read a lot about domains, web devolopment, SEO etc. (mostly from here).
Then, with my wife's help, I've found myself in a little niche. I'm surpised at the availability of the domains in this niche considering it's one of the most recognizable items in the world by sight or name and has been for over a hundred years. In fact, I've been able to get some keyword.org, keyword.net, keyword.info, and keywordonline.com or kw.net with a very high success rate.
I've also found myself in a similar niche which, for the lack of a better compatison, would be like the Mac users of this parent industry. They're picky, very traditional, educated, and do not like to be left behind. They account for about 5% of the total parent industry but represent about 75% of the attitude. :)
Gold? Not yet, I don't even think close. Think more like copper with a few bits of silver, but with the right tools and information they could easily become platinum in a year or so.
Yes, I know I'm kinda breaking the rules by not mentioning a domain, but I feel that there are *plenty* of other realms out there that I think I can take full advantage of before I start even mentioning the industry. :)
Aside from that, thank you for the great information!
As I was reading their latest briefing my mind kept making a sort of clunking noise. I eventually determined that my cliche filter had clogged, causing a seal to blow and an interpretive bearing burnt out, causing the clunking sound as I read the page.
So, I scrape the page and paste it into MS Word. I break down each sentence into its constituent cliches and it's a cliche . . err . . gold mine . . umm . . it's the cliche mother load . . argh.
So I ask myself: "Self, is every friggin cliche on this list of some 200 phrases also a domain name?" (How cliche,right?)
No! "Close, but no cigar!" (Argh. I can't stop. I'm infected.)
So, I go to work. Scan the unregistered cliches and I ask myself: "How popular is this cliche?" I mean, what cliche "isn't popular", right? Whoa! 2.4 million reported exact matches! All that and it has the makings of a funny name for a topical website, too.
Soooo . . my cliche-domain might even be worth a few bucks more than the reg fee. I like it! :)
Queue the music: "Oops I did it again . . . "
Heard around the watercooler: "So, Webwork, I've seen your domaining work and I gotta say that lately it's a little . . unimaginative . . a bit . . cliche."
Alrighty, back to work. More examples and lessons, please. (I'm still working on mine and . . "it's a doozy" . . and, darnit, somebody has already registered "that". Cute. Memorable. ;0)
Looking forward.
All my life, one of my goals is to make a huge, huge difference in Africa some day.
What is the one thing that could radically change the face of Africa more than anything else? Water.
So for the past 10 years I have been nagged by this persistent dream that more water could solve a lot of problems. It is hard to be pissed off and planning terrorism when your lush fields are full of fruit, you have a big flower garden, the lawn is green, and you have a river full of salmon meandering through your front yard.
The only way you are going to get more than enough water to places like Africa, the middle east, and Phoenix, is through desalination i.e. (Turning salt water to fresh water) If you ask experts why we don't use it yet more, they will tell you it costs too much.
Well it does at the moment!
I have a buddy who has 50,000 head of cattle that he has to water, and feed. One of the main requirements for doing this is water. In much of the world this is a limiting factor in cattle food production. He was going over costs per acre foot of water and I realized that some farmers are now buying some of their water in the U.S. for prices that are getting close to the cost of desalinated water.
Babing, clunk clunk go the gears in my mind, and I bought a whole mess of desalination domain names.
I am actually in the process of developing these, but don't really see income or profit from them for a decade or more to come.
It kind of reminds me of the investing strategy where you buy the land that is 10 or 20 miles outside of where the city ends now. It is still cheap and out of the way at the moment, but most cities keep on expanding, and within 10 years or so that will be prime real estate.
How bout AfricaDesalination.com and AfricanDesalination.com to start?
dk
More recently I found the available domain of a multi billionaire dollar development that will appear on everyone's TV in a few years time. A friend of mine builds successful blogs about big projects like these so I let him have it. Not sure what I was thinking but this guy has been helpful so!
I have also acquired many high quality generic domains with traffic and earnings in excess of the reg fee using a certain backordering company that is so poor at backordering it sometimes only "catches" domains after they have been dropped and tasted several times. I only pay slightly above reg fee for these domains and I know people that beat this service with manual registrations.
Lots of opportunities in the domain space, think new, think big.
So, now for a quick example.
I was at Barnes & Noble the other night, sitting in their coffee shop, ingesting a book on WordPress. It was time to give my tired, 51 year old brain a respite, so what did I do to "relax"? I picked up a magazine I've never read before titled . . "Internet Retailer".
Interesting read. Full of industry analysis and advice and trend spotting and analysis. Page after page of discussion - and Ads - related to software. Ummm . . software . . general categories of software . . not any company's product name . . just category or class names . . like software that a retailer can install to help online customers search the website for products or information . . generally or generically refered as . " " software . . Hmmmm.
So, whilst reading I'm taking some notes, writing down keywords, generic descriptive terms. My plan is that later, when my brain is completely fried (a suitable state for domaining planned in advance) I enter those keywords into a bulk domain checking box of my favorite domain registar and guess what?
I hurt just a little bit. I've been publicly barking about the subject of domain based marketing for years. It's 2007. There are still industries - online industries for heaven's sake - ones that target the same damned words via SEO, PPC, etc. - that haven't stopped to pick up the generic, type-in industry related keyword domains. I mean, I've done my best. I've "put it out there" and I'll be damned if I'm going to feel bad about registering a few more generics that the best of minds in various industries just can't bring themselves to register. It must mean that they really don't want them. There's no other good explanation. Not in 2007. ("Who's in charge here?" I keep asking myself. "Helleeeeewwwww? Anybody hooooooome in the marketing department?" Generic domains? Targeted traffic? Sales leads for <$10.00 a pop? Not good enough? Too hard to figure out? Put you out of a job if it was that easy?)
Okay, so having suffered my moment of "domainer's remorse" - you know, that sadness that "the industry types just don't get it" - I proceed to register a few more generic traffic domains. All up and coming software. All generics. The type where I'm prepared to beat off anyone who says otherwise with a stick. ;)
Now, what to do?
Well, for the moment they will be parked. I'd love to do an instant build but there's only so many hours in the day. The parking approach does 2 things: It gives an indication of whether there is any current traffic and, if so, helps to pay for the registration fees.
Am I upset it there's not an instant stream of PPC clicks on the lander? No, not at all. I'm typically operating in the "predictive domaining and marketing" realm, so I don't expect much traffic. Frankly, if there was a lot of traffic the domain likely wouldn't be unregistered right now. (Screw the "domain tasters" for their inability to predict the future. I wish to get in on the game whilst the land is still cheap and available.)
Predictive domaining may cost me a few years but I target markets that look to be growing and therefore making my investment appreciate over time. Many of the domains that I registered in 1999-2003 are just beginning to shine now, as other countries get online, as industries that were once all about face-to-face realize that the future of dealmaking and promotion is online, etc.
Also, keep in mind something that I've written about in this forum before: A key element of domain value in my analysis is the converted lead value of the domain traffic, not the PPC cost. Any one of the domains I registered - if its traffic results in 1 sales lead that converts into a sale - is likely to generate income to the tune of $25-50,000.00 and up. What's a domain that performs in that manner worth if it "does its thing" once every 2-3 years? (Conservatively estimating type-in sales lead potential.)
So, I now have several new generic ecommerce software domains to play with. They will be fine for topical minisites to start.
One of the beauties of domaining "my way" is that I only go after domains where the domain's topic holds my interest. Software? Moi? Yes, absolutely, because I either may have to make a buying decision myself (so why not write about the research and profit from it) and, by writing about anything one forms some interesting connections.
So B&N "brain rest" + topical magazine reading + genericl emerging industry phrases for a topic (software) + a bit of reading about the software to predict its future relevance and likely value and voila!
So, who's next?
[edited by: Webwork at 4:42 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2007]
However, two days ago, I was reading about a recent software announcement, and suddenly a light bulb went on over my head; I had a mental picture of a site in mind, and I thought "wow, wouldn't that be a great domain name to have? Nah, it's only seven letters plus TLD, it MUST be taken..."
But just for laughs, I fired up whois on my nearest FreeBSD box, and sure enough, it was available, as well as the .org and .net versions. So I snapped 'em up. As far as I can tell, with no previous history in archive.org, I am the first to have them. They may or may not prove to have any real commercial value, but hey, I'm just amazed I got such short domain names in 2007. And they cost me less than $25 combined.
gotpack.com (and .org and .net)
Hope this post qualifies - like I said, I'm new at this.
Instead, I look to fill in gaps. Product A works great with product B, but with some tweaking (start thinking).
Product D is made by a company with a horrible track record, hmm, productdsupport.com? productdhelp.com? productd.info?
Excellent ideas to build up a community based on these ideas. We all work in companies similar to mine, why not start looking into the industry? Who else would be a better person to pick up a domain to build a community than someone who works in the industry?
productdsupport.com? producthelp.com?
Reminder: be VERY careful to avoid infringing on anyone else's registered trademarks.
The negative: current catch-phrases ("got <something>") may expire in the future.
The positive: one good source of creative domain names is to personalize the domain. Make it the user's. Mine, mine, mine! Good for most any kind of service. You'd think it's over-used, but there are plenty of domains available.
Since I've already used my one magic cookie, I'll have to be abstract about another domain I recently registered. I was thinking about providing a mobile proxy service for those who would rather use an independent proxy than the one provided by the cell phone company. So, I added "MyWay" to the end a 3-letter industry term.
<3-letter term>MyWay.com
The positive: one good source of creative domain names is to personalize the domain.
Yep, I did that too last month, with something that was a six word vogue-y domain - I just put My in front of it and took it out. I gotta find time to do something with it before it goes out of fashion.
Shockingly enough, no one had registered *any* of these domains! Not the .com, .org, .net, .info...
Wow!
the groans can begin.
I follow domains that have sold in the last year or so. Often there are very similar or even better geo-targeted domains yet unregistered. I'm still not sure why they are available, but they are.
With the recent sale of Treehugger.com for $10 million I started wondering what else could be available that falls into the environmental or green category. Green... that got me to thinking.
It turns out there were a few U.S. [state]Green.com domains still available so I bought them, but there was even one better. There was a single Green[state].com domain that was unregistered -
GreenAlabama.com
This industry is a very emotional and driven group. GreenAlabama.com should not have been just laying around.
Just kinda wandered around in whois with one domain after the other showing registered and then I tried
dodoggie.com Creation Date: 02-Aug-2007
has never been registered. couldn't believe it... I really feel this is a good find and this domain will be worth some bucks as it has an easy rememberance, catchy and through favor of the Lord I stumbled I registered it.
The story is some of the better finds are like hunting sometimes you are in the right place at the right time. There really is I am sure a logical approach to this buying domains but I feel some of the better ones just happen.
