Buying Domain Names

Mike Berkens informed us that the list of the most popular 1,000 male and 1,000 female baby names in 2009 in the US was recently released. Not too surprisingly, all 2,000 of the names in .com were registered. It was surprising to learn that Berkens’ company owns over 100 of them. Actually, on second thought, it’s not so surprising considering his stellar portfolio.

So with these 2,000 .com domain names registered, you might wonder how you can utilize this list. I have a few ideas that might help you keep an eye on some good names.

1) Using DomainTools, monitor some of the secondary domain names that might be of interest in the future. As some of the less popular .com names expire in a couple of years, you’ll know about it ASAP and can back order or buy them.

2) Buy alternate extensions like .net or .org.   I know a couple of people who own their .org domain names and they love using them on cards and resumes. One is an actress and it’s great for producers to remember her name and see her credits.

3) Buy names like FranksBlog.com or StevesWebsite.com. I’d imagine these would be considered generic / defensible, and they have value. In fact, someone messaged me about the typo name I own – ElliottsBlog.com, although I have no interest in selling that name.

While doing Whois searches to try and acquire domain names in the aftermarket, I often encounter privacy services, and I generally don’t send an email inquiry. I’ve always figured the owner wasn’t interested in selling if he or she had the privacy shield in place. On second thought now, it might be a good opportunity to contact these people.

Did you know that you could send an email to the privacy email address on file, and many privacy guard services will forward your email directly to the owner?   This is the case with many companies, so if you have a compelling offer, you might want to try emailing the privacy service.

Despite the improving economy, some domain owners are still selling domain names that would not have been previously on the market. If you send a good offer, you might be surprised at the results. At the very least, you will probably be more likely to contact a domain owner that doesn’t receive as many inquiries as he would if his email address wasn’t privatized.

Keep in mind that this could result in an angry reply, as many owners really do not wish to be solicited even if you think your offer is good. One thing to keep in mind is that you should always make an offer that you wouldn’t be embarrassed by if you met the domain owner in person. There have been a couple of times where I’ve made the mistake of a lowball offer and it’s generally embarrassing 🙂

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.