Over the years, I’ve learned there are many, many ways to make money from domain investments.
As you can probably tell simply by seeing the names I’ve sold and what I own, I personally prefer to purchase descriptive keyword domain names like DogWalker.com, Torah.com, and EventManagement.com among others. These are exact match terms for keyword searches like professions, business fields, objects…etc.
Each week in the aftermarket sales reports, I see dozens of other domain names sell for decent figures, and I can only assume most were hand registered by the seller at some point. There always seem to be sales of  brandable keyword domain names like ClearBell.com and made up terms like Vipee.com (both names sold last week via Afternic).
People can make a nice living selling brandable keyword domain names and made up terms, in addition to exact match keyword domain names. Of course, there are plenty of others, like ccTLD, gTLD, and IDN among others, but for the sake of this, let’s keep it .com.
I am curious what types of domain names you prefer for your investments. Please vote in the poll below, and feel free to discuss.
I voted Descriptive Keywords
my make up like “BullS”
express yourself via domains
Descriptive Keywods
That should read Descriptive KeyWORDS (sorry)
Descriptive words have an edge over brandables..
Right now, I’m finding the best opportunities in brandable keyword domains.
The catch is, they are profoundly harder to ‘get right’. The Google Keyword tool is worthless when deciding if ChairUniverse.com is better than CarpetWorld.com.
Do you proactively find buyers or do you wait until the buyers find you and contact you? Also, do you make most of your sales through direct inquiries or from aftermarket platforms?
I do list them on the aftermarket, very rarely do I proactively find buyers but occasionally, if a few factors are present. I usually use a generic sale lander. I do stick to quality and don’t stray from that, so the inquiries are relatively consistent. They’re not like what you get with a premier generic .com, but there’s a pulse there that isn’t present with garbage.
The operating math is a bit different with them since parking income isn’t a factor. If you keep with quality, they have a very positive expectation (you only need to sell a year one to carry the water on a few hundred others) but it’s getting harder to develop an inventory decent (X)World.com’s and (X)Universe.com and My(X).com for registry fee, or even a single prerelease bid. 2009-2011 was a goldmine for them, the last great drop opportunity since 2001.
I like to go by descriptive upincoming career fields type of keywords (dot coms)—-thinking they may be especially valuable in the future. If I understand the terms correctly ‘brandable’ means able to sell or create a business brand around it…..smaller end-user audience but maybe better for sedo or afternic sales platform.
I hand registered some months back: http://www.aftermarketvaluations.com because I am thinking the domain business is going to grow. (I think that’s the name….maybe it’s not plural)….I’d check but lose this post in the process.
I am concerned however about Google lately…..I am sensing unless you know all the keywords exactly to type in Google does not connect appropriate two or three word matches anymore…I’ve sensed this for less than a week now…i.e. I typed in Avril and it didn’t pop up Lavigne next to it…..
I also like descriptive Keyword domain. Also have been buying product and service names,(related to what I do and know) I have stopped regging for resale and am now just buying develop Domains .
If you cant sell focus on leasing your domain names, it has worked for me.
Interesting mainly because for the past 6 months I’ve been investing heavily in expired PPC domains (invested just over 20k so far)
Although ideally I’d like to stick with descriptive keywords not all domains with decent PPC are.
For example I have Yopox.com which has earned about $120 parked for 5 months ($113 with direct typeins) yet his name makes no sense what so ever.
One of my better PPC domains ($800 rev in the last 5 months)is neither a descriptive keyword, brandable keyword nor a made up term since its in a language that I can’t even pronounce! never the less it seems to be popular to it’s native speakers and yeah in has an adult theme associated to it.
Revs goo though so not complaining even though google translate is lol.. must be a java thing from my end! 😉
jayjay–
Any one company better to park domain names at then another?
Patti
@Patti For me any domain company providing a Google ad feed and asking for minimum commission for their service is great.
That said your best to search forums like NP DNF and others for this topic (as I do on occasion) to gain insight to whats hot in recent PPC parking companies.
For my portfolio (entertainment genres = constant visitors) I went from Parked to Bodis a few years ago and my domains have been happy campers there since 😉
I think that made up term domains can be very effective for businesses trying to stand out, especially if the names are rooted in language and form logical associations with relevant words/ideas.