People usually thinking of defensive registrations as buying various extensions when they own the .com, buying the plural version of their domain name, and/or buying the common typos of their domain name. For really important domain names that receive strong traffic, doing all of this and forwarding all accidental traffic to the main domain name is advisable.
Sometimes you have to do more than this for your defensive registrations, even when you probably aren’t even going to develop the domain name. For example, I recently announced the acquisition of CelebrityBabyPhotos.com. I bought the name because more and more celebrities are being paid big bucks to gossip magazines for the rights to the first exclusive photos of their babies. To help protect this domain name, and to also increase the value of the package, I also recently purchased CelebrityBabyPictures.om.
Individually, these are both strong names, but I believe the value of the two names together is greater. No matter whether people are searching for “celebrity baby photos” or “celebrity baby pictures,” I am covered.
Making Defensive Registrations
Where's Elliot?
Sorry for the light posting this past week. I have been in New Hampshire and Lowell, Massachusetts doing research for Lowell.com. Now that the base of the site has been built, optimizing it for search has become the main priority. This involves going through each page, changing meta tags and anchor text to make sure each page can be seen and read by Google. Not so much fun, but a necessary part of development. Hopefully the fruits of this labor will help with the ranking of Lowell.com.
Once the website has been optimized (although I think it will be an ongoing process), I am going to begin seeking advertisers. In my visit to the city of Lowell spanning a few days, I met some business leaders and city leaders, and I was warmly received. I hope they saw my passion for this site, and I have really taken a liking to Lowell. My goal is to make the site mutually beneficial for the city, its residents, its visitors, and the businesses who will advertise on the site.
For now, it’s back to the optimization process. I should be back to blogging next week.
Deal of the Day – CreditReportTracker.com
I saw that CreditScoreTracker.com currently has a pre-auction bid of $2,500 at the DRT Live auction. In that respect, I would like to offer CreditReportTracker.com for just $1,000. I think these names are fairly comparable, but I am happy to give a great price to sell the name. First person to post “sold” in the comment section of the blog gets the name, which is registered at Moniker.
Great Coincidence in Lowell
I just had a great tour of the Whistler Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts led by the museum’s curator. As a history buff and art lover, the museum tour was great, and I saw some nice pieces of art, in addition to making a new friend and contact in the process. I am planning to do this type of thing quite a bit to meet people who live in Lowell and to learn about the city of Lowell so I can make the make Lowell.com a useful resource to residents and visitors.
In the process of the museum tour, I met the artist in residence, who is a very friendly lady and a talented painter. After I introduced myself and told her about my website, she let me know she would check it out when she had a chance. She also told me she planned to check out another city .com website for an upcoming visit to her daughter who lives in the midwest. Since she had never been to this city, she wanted to learn about the history and about some of the art related places in the area.
Incidentally, the city where her daughter lives is Nashville, Tennessee, and of course she plans to visit Nashville.com, owned by the Castello Brothers. What a small world!
Using Comps to Buy Domain Names
A while ago I discussed buying domain names to capitalize on industry trends and recent sales. For example, VideoShop.com sold for $30,900 last week, so very similar names like VideoStore.com or VideoShops.com would be great buys in a similar price range, as the sale of VideoShop.com could be used as a comparison point to make a profit (if you are buying for flipping purposes). Using relevant sales for comparison and valuation purposes is a great idea, and it’s a good way to pinpoint the value of a very similar domain name.
However, people should be cautious to not go out and make stupid registrations to try and capitalize on these trends and sales. Recently, Pizza.com sold for $2.6 million at auction. Since then, I can’t tell you how many pizza names have been listed for sale on various forums and sales venues at ridiculous prices. Just because Pizza.com sold for $2.6 million doesn’t mean GetYourHotPizza.com or NeighborhoodPizzaPlace.com are automatically worth anything, and in many cases, they aren’t worth any more than the registration fee.
Understanding why a domain name sold and buying similar names for the same reasons is good. For example, names like PizzaShop.com and PizzaDelivery.com are great because they make sense. Simply appending a word to the front or back of “Pizza” don’t automatically make it a good name. When you are trying to capitalize on a trend, do some keyword research to see why the name sold, and try to find similar names. Just because a name sounds like another name or looks close to another name, it doesn’t mean it has similar value.
Thank You!
Thank you very much to those of you who voted for me in the 2008 Name Intelligence Users Choice Awards. I am very honored to share the award for Best Blog Community with Frank Schilling (SevenMile.com) and Frank Michlick and Adam Strong (DomainNameNews.com). I enjoy sharing my domain investment and development experiences with you, and I am glad you enjoy reading!
The list of 2008 Name Intelligence Users Choice award winners:
Registrar with the Largest Net Gain – GoDaddy
Best Registrar for Resellers – Enom
Outstanding Drop Catcher – NameJet
Outstanding Secondary Market – Sedo
Best Registrar – Moniker
Best Parking Company (tie): Sedo and Parked.com
Best Aftermarket – Afternic
Best Forum – DNForum.com
Best Blog Community (3-way tie): SevenMile.com (Frank Schilling), Elliot’s Blog (Elliot Silver) and Domain Name News (Adam Strong and Frank Michlick).
Best Industry Coverage – DNJournal.com