Before buying a domain name in private or at auction, I tend to do a fair amount of research. I would not call this research exhaustive, nor do I fully research every domain name I buy. One thing I try to do is see if the domain name was on the market before, and if so, at what price.

For a variety of reasons (including the emergence of Sedo’s network and Afternic’s GoDaddy listings as well as a greater interest in selling domain names), people have been adding buy it now prices to their inventory. Some of these domain names have the prices listed right on the landing page while others have the pricing information available on a marketplace. Prospective buyers don’t always need to inquire to get the price of a domain name – it is much easier to find prices these days.

Knowing the former owner’s asking price is an important data point for me when buying a domain name, so I try to do a domain name pricing history check when possible. If a domain name held a low asking price, there might not be enough margin in it for me, and I would need to raise the BIN price to justify buying it. I must ask myself why I would have better luck selling it than the former owner. Oftentimes, I can’t justify this and will pass on the auction. Conversely, if the domain name had a super high asking price, perhaps prospective buyers simply passed on the domain name and a lower price point would make the name appealing.

Here’s an example:

My wife and I read to our kids every night before bed. They have their favorite books that change on a regular basis, and they are always adding books to their collections. We read everything from princess adventures, race car stories, animal books, and everything in between.

When I am reading in the evening, I often think about different words and phrases as domain names. I’ll see a couple of words or phrases and note them in my head for when I get a chance to do a Whois lookup later on that evening or the next day. I think childrens’ books are a great source of inspiration for domain name ideas.

Kids’ books generally have

Push.com is a valuable domain name, which I would be happy to own. The Whois record for Push.com is private, and the domain name forwards to the sparsely populated @push_dot_com Twitter page. It looks like that Twitter handle has only posted one tweet since it was created in October 2016.

I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone tried to buy the domain name via Twitter, and of course there were many attempts. So far, it doesn’t look like any of these efforts have been successful:

It’s been a while since I shared a list of domain names I recently acquired, so I thought I would kick off the week by doing that. Listed below are 30 domain names I bought since the beginning of 2018.

Instead of just sharing what I consider to be the “blue chip” domain names I bought so far this year, I am sharing a list of names that include some of the best names plus domain names I would consider to be sellable inventory.

It should be easy for investors to identify the top names, but I also want to give readers an idea of the types of domain names I think are worth picking up for the right price. The purchases I listed below are either private acquisitions or auction buys. I did not include any domain names I bought in 2018 and already sold.

Here are 30 of my domain name purchases so far in 2018: