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US City .Com Domain Names Wanted

Elliot Silver
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53

I am once again looking to acquire smaller US city .com domain names that meet the specific requirements set out below. Please see the bullet points below, and if your domain name(s) meet ALL of the requirements, please post a comment with your domain name(s) and price(s).

  1. Actual United States city known by its residents as the name you have (Wikipedia page is a must)
  2. .COM only
  3. No hyphens
  4. Between 15,000 – 75,000 residents
  5. Keep in mind that I am not paying end user prices, so if your pricing isn’t great, your names aren’t for me. There’s nothing wrong with setting high prices, but I am looking for good values for these types of names.

If your name does meet the requirements but just isn’t of interest to me (maybe due to pricing or other reason), I will still post your comment so others can see.

If your domain name doesn’t meet one of the requirements, I will delete it and will not reply. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I have set out very specific parameters, and I would hope you respect my time and not submit domain names that aren’t related to this request.

Use The Most Popular Baby Name List to Buy Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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6

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.

Making an Offer Despite Domain Privacy Services

Elliot Silver
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9

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 🙂

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.

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