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Buying Domain Names

Rosanna Scotto’s Soy Jizzum… The Race For the .Com is On

Elliot Silver
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8

You may not have seen the clip yet, but on Fox 5 New York this morning, one of the anchors referred to “soy jizzum” in an article about soy milk. The news went viral, with everyone from the Huffington Post to Gawker covering the news.

As the video gets thousands of page views and new remix videos are created on You Tube (see below), the race to register the domain name SoyJizzum.com has officially started. So who will be first? Will the buyer purchase all of those typos? How do you spell jizzum anyway? I bet you’re Googling it right now… dirty minds.

Tip for Buying Good Names to Resell

Elliot Silver
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9

Once in a while, I will have a domain buyer who has a specific type of interest. Generally, this comes from a domain sale I made to an end user, and obviously the end user wouldn’t be interested in random other domain names, no matter how great they are.

If you present this buyer with other good names of similar quality to the name he bought, there’s a chance he might buy others. The problem always becomes finding good domain names that are of the same quality. Here’s a tip I can share with you to give you an idea of what I do.

I search for other websites in that industry/vertical, and I find the websites with the best navigation. I then find the keywords that are used for products and services on those websites, noting those that are used most.   Once I have a list (or while still searching through the list), I do both GAKT searches as well as standard Google searches to see the frequency of searches and the number of companies advertising those different terms I’ve found.

Once I have a list of domain names that I think would be valuable, I come up with a sales price in my mind. This may be the hardest part, but I place a hypothetical bottom price I think each domain name could yield to this buyer or to others. I then begin the process of contacting the owners and/or seeing if the domain names are already for sale, and I make offers based on what I think I can get for the domain name.

There are two things you need to be cautious about:

1) The buyer won’t want additional domain names even if they’re of similar quality. You’ll still be able to pitch the name(s) to others, but end user sales aren’t always easy, and it might be tough to flip specific names to domain investors.

2) You obviously need to be realistic with your price, and lowballing to get a name at your necessary level of profit margin generally isn’t a good idea, unless it’s not owned by an end user. Keep in mind that if the name is owned by an end user already and you do make a lowball that’s accepted, it should tell you something about the domain name!

Domain Suggestions Tool

Elliot Silver
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4

I was using NameTumbler.com, a website operated by WhyPark that allows you to enter specific target keywords and choose from drop down lists of other keywords, forming potential domain names. I thought this tool was neat, and it helped me locate some city keyword domain names related to a couple of websites I operate.

The one downside to this tool is that it doesn’t simply provide a list of available to register domain names. You need to cut and paste the list into the bulk domain registration tool at your registrar (they have it linked to Godaddy). The downside was that I twice erased my list of available names, as every time I searched a new term, the entire page refreshed (including the Godaddy search page), eliminating the available names I had kept in that list.

I did some searching to see what other tools I could find to help find potentially valuable domain names, and I found the Domain Suggestions Tool at Name.com, which is more comprehensive than the other tool I was using. With Name.com, you can enter your search term, and it provides a list of related recommended terms. It also lets you know which names are available to register, and you can easily register them and see what other extensions are available to register.

Not only does it look for English terms, but it also does searches for IDN domain names, too. For example, I could purchase 犬の散歩.com, which is the Japanese term for “dog walking.” I don’t have an international audience on my website, but that would be pretty cool if I did.

In addition to the Name.com recommendations, the search tool also provides Google Keyword Suggestions as well based on similar keywords and keyword phrases found frequently in Google. Using the tool, I was able to hand register CatSitters.org, which I think is a nice complement to my site, CatSitter.com. There are a number of organizations for walkers and sitters, and as my business grows, that could be a way to expand it.

If you are looking to invest in hand registered domain names, these two tools can be helpful to you.

Using Page Titles to Find Good Domains

Elliot Silver
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4

While I think it’s always smart to register domain names in an industry in which you are familiar, there are plenty of times where this isn’t feasible or sensible. When you aren’t entirely familiar with a particular industry, looking at some of the page titles in industry specific websites can give you good ideas about what types of names would have value.

If a company dedicates a page on its website to a specific topic or service, or if it mentions the term in the title of it’s home page, I would bet that it’s likely that the .com domain name of that exact match term will be of interest to them or someone else in their industry.

Let’s use the search term “soccer cleats” to illustrate my point. Here’s a look at some of the page title keyword phrases I found in Google when I search for soccer cleats:

  • Soccer Cleats
  • Soccer Jerseys
  • Soccer Gear
  • Soccer Equipment
  • Soccer Balls
  • Indoor Soccer Shoes
  • Soccer Goals
  • Youth Soccer
  • Soccer Footwear

In my opinion, if you owned the .com of any of these key phrases, it would be likely one or more of the leading soccer sales companies (either those listed in the top of the results or those advertising) would be interested in buying the domain name from you. Some of the .com names would be more valuable than others, but if you found one for sale for a few thousand dollars, you could probably flip it for more.

Searching like this has been done by people like myself for a while, and many of the strong keyword names have been registered for a number of years. However, there are plenty of terms that can still be bought and flipped for great prices. Doing research like this is important because there are plenty of companies who would LOVE to own names like these, but they wouldn’t know how to get them.

If you do the legwork, which includes domain research, acquisition negotiations, and buyer research, you could end up making some great deals.

Some Sunday Thoughts

Elliot Silver
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17

It’s another lazy(ish) Sunday, and here are some things I am thinking about today. Hope you have a great afternoon!

  • Does anyone know of a tool/script that I can use to analyze names at Snapnames and Namejet? Specifically, I would like to load a list of names (10,000 or more) into the tool, and it will spit out the GAKT exact matches, # of results in Google, # of advertisers in Google for that keyword, Average PPC for the term, and Ovt for the domain name as of the last update? I’d imagine it would require someone knowledgeable about programming and Google.
  • For those who don’t know (some people asked in a previous post) GAKT stands for Google Adwords: Keyword Tool, and it can be found in your Adwords account. I only use the exact match searches to get an idea about how many people are looking for those keywords. It’s not an indicator of type in traffic to me, but it does show how many people are looking for information about that topic every month.
  • I am very thankful that the earthquake in Chile and subsequent tsunami action seems to have relatively limited casualties. I have a friend who has been traveling to Chile and I heard from him today (he wasn’t there). Glad that he wasn’t impacted.
  • I hope this doesn’t come off as “jerky” but I want to give a quick tip when registering domain names. Any name could be developed into just about anything. When buying names, think about whether you will spend the time to develop it or whether someone else will realistically pay you for the rights to do it. I would much rather own one good name that I bought for $2,500 than 300 newly registered names. If you don’t end up selling them, you’re just going to double your carrying costs the next year.

Quick Tip to Buy Domains in Private

Elliot Silver
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22

This morning, I was looking through some drops on Snapnames for the next couple of days. I was researching one of the names I thought was worth bidding on, and I saw that it was an expired domain name rather than a private seller’s auction. After some further research (including a Whois History search), I saw that it was owned by a company whose name I’ve seen on a number of previous Whois searches, and the company owns thousands of domain names.

When companies begin dropping domain names from their portfolio, it usually means one of a couple of things. The first (and usually most likely) is that they didn’t think the name was valuable. For some reason, they decided that this particular domain name isn’t worth $8/year to renew. There are plenty of names I have dropped because I didn’t sell them and I didn’t want to throw good money after bad.

The second potential cause is that the company is facing financial troubles, and they need to lower their overhead. Not renewing domain names is a way to reduce overhead, although it’s probably not the smartest way to do so, as this would bring no revenue to the company. However, if a company is dropping thousands of domain names, it might not be worth searching through huge lists to find one or two worth keeping.

Since the name has at least 2 bidders now, I don’t think the first scenario is likely. With that said, I am going to reach out to the company in private and see if I can buy some of their domain names. If they are facing a cash crunch, perhaps we can work out a deal for other names I’ve looked at in the past. They could get the much needed liquidity, and I could get some strong names at good prices.

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