NameTrader.com

My partner and I (Domainate.com) just launched the new domain sales blog DailyDomainNames.com! There, our goal is to provide quality domains under $1,000 apiece. They will be domains of our own as well as domains that other people submit to us that meet our strict quality standards and are priced to sell. If you buy domains on a regular basis, you will NOT want to miss out on it!

Here is the first day’s worth of domains for sale!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales, My Happenings

TelefonareGratis(.)com is on Sedo Auction ending on 8/9/09 9:11 AM EST and is only at $140 at the moment

The term telefonare gratis is Italian for “free call” and is searched 2,400 times per month on Google with an average CPC of $4.47…ergo a lot of high valued traffic per month looking for telefonare gratis.  Buy the domain, put a quick little affiliate site on it with some SEO done to it and you’ll take a large chunk of that search traffic and probably more!  Note that these traffic #s are for Google…don’t forget Bing, where it’s been shown that exact term match in the domain makes a bigger difference than at Google.

This auction is ending soon so act quickly!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales auction, Domain Names, domains, sale

A bid of $60 received by July 22nd, 2009 9:00 PM EST on any one of the domains below listed on Sedo.com will start a 7-day auction for the domain with your $60 bid as the first bid. If the domain receives no other bids by the end of the auction, you’ve won it for $60! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get a high quality domain for pennies on the dollar, as we generally sell our domains for hundreds or even thousands of dollars apiece! In the list, we’ve included for each domain’s keywords the average cost per click in Google AdWords, the Google Adwords advertiser competition (scale of 0 to 1, 1 being full competition), last month’s U.S. search volume on Google, and the average global monthly search volume on Google to help you determine if a domain may be right for you.

Simply click on the domain you want in the list below to go to its Sedo.com listing where you can enter your $60 bid! If clicking the domain takes you to an auction page for the domain, that means someone has already bidded on it, BUT you can still enter a higher bid. If you have any questions, please contact us!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales auction, Domain Names, domains, sale, sales

It’s good to know exactly what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it (duh)…sometimes when you don’t, you’ll find yourself spreading information that’s not quite true. I’m sure especially in this day and age of always on-the-go super busy people, this sort of thing happens all the time – people hear one sentence on the news while they’re in the middle of something, don’t hear the next sentence which gave the former one context, and next thing you know they’re spreading some juicy tidbit of news that’s largely incorrect!

In my case, at a live event a week and a half ago, I had many domain discussions with people in which I had quoted my own research on .org domains vs. .net domains, research based on Quantcast’s top 1 million sites list, more importantly before Alexa started coming out with a downloadable top 1 million rankings of their own. I’m a huge .org enthusiast so I was championing the popularity of .org. I hadn’t thought twice about what I said there – I found what I found to be true.

In preparing for posting about .org here on my blog, I went and looked at Alexa’s toplist to confirm my prior research…and I was shocked at what I saw – 43,050 sites on .org domains vs. 65,516 sites on .net domains! Oops – this interesting tidbit of info I had been telling people was a blanket statement of “there’s nearly twice as many .org’s as .net’s in the top 1 million sites on the net” without explaining that it was based on Quantcast’s toplist, which in turn is based on US data. But here again after seeing this, I started to wonder if my brain perhaps played tricks on me before, so to confirm I wasn’t perhaps completely looney and wasn’t seeing things in my initial research, I looked again at Quantcast’s toplist. Whew: 101,936 sites on .org domains vs. 57,873 sites on .net domains, and in fact the .org count was less than 100,000 before so it’s on the rise even!

So – what I was telling people was not completely misleading, but still, I should have been more careful about what I said! Given Quantcast researches US traffic and Alexa researches worldwide traffic, it’s only expected that they may show vastly different results, and in this case there was a difference that shows that while .org IS clearly more popular for US traffic, .net may still have the edge with international traffic. I should have known too – I do fairly regularly look at Alexa’s top 500 sites, usually to see bigger sites as they burst onto the scene, and I HAVE seen a pattern just in that sampling of more Asian-language sites on .net than on .org. It didn’t occur to me to research Alexa’s toplist when it became downloadable to see if that was consistent throughout their top 1 million, which it clearly is.

Moral of the story: Be careful! One misunderstanding in your research could have you on the wrong path, or worse yet could have you spewing misleading information to others as if it was fact! Thankfully I still was right in some context, but I’m sure some people have experienced being horribly wrong and taking a nice reputation hit from not being completely sure of what they were talking about in the first place. Especially now with social media being big and personal branding increasing a lot, the last thing you want to do is screw your trust with people by being wrong on something you’re supposed to be an expert on!

Steve Domain Names Domain Names, research, statistics, traffic

What do you as a domainer typically do to find the best available or expiring domains? I bet I can guess. You download list after list, perform searches on all domains containing X keyword, list everything that comes to your head and then check to see what’s available. Then if you’re smart, you’ll do the necessary keyword research on the domains, finding out how many searches per month there are for the domain’s keyword phrase, what the cost per click is for it, maybe even how many results there are in Google for it. That’s fine and dandy, but what if you’re like me and want to go through tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of domains every day? Are you content with spending your hours doing the boring task of going through a huge list of domains, removing the extension and splitting them into their keywords? You shouldn’t be – people get paid $1-$3 an hour to do work like that. Is your time worth that little?

What if I told you there’s another way to search for domains where that entire amount of work is cut out of the process and you still get all your keyword research done? It’s a lot simpler than you might think and merely involves reversing the process – getting lists of keywords, doing the research, and THEN creating the list of domains from it. I myself have done a lot of this merely within Excel and have found lots of nice available domains through it – in fact I’ve sold some domains registered from this process for as much as $1,300. However, my inspiration for this article was from finding a couple of nice keyword tools that help in the process and make it a no-brainer for anyone to start doing this.

Let’s take one of these nice keyword tools: The Geo Keyword Tool from PPC Classroom (more info about PPC Classroom at the end of the article, but read on first!). No geo domainer should be without a tool like this! Basically it already has geo lists like Largest World Cities, USA Cities, USA States, USA Cities with State, Canadian Cities, Canadian Provinces, and World Capitals, and there’s an area where you enter in keywords (hotels, travel, visit, real estate, etc.) to combine with whichever of the geo lists you want (you pick them out and click “Add”). You would then pick out “pre” placement (San Diego travel) or “post” placement (visit San Diego) and click “Generate Geo Keywords”. It then will create the entire list of your keywords combined with the geo keywords to create full geo terms. I can speak from Excel experience that putting these lists together in Excel is NOT that easy. Even with my knowledge, I generally only do a couple keywords at a time so to mow through a lot of keywords in the instant of a click makes this the one and only geo keyword tool I’ll probably ever use.

The key about this and about using keyword generating tools in general is that you can then use this list directly to find out the search, avg. CPC, and ad competition in Google’s Keyword Tool for these terms – they’re already in convenient “keyword” form! The thing to remember is you can only research 300 terms at a time in the Google Keyword Tool, so paste the terms in an Excel spreadsheet and use the row #s to guide you in selecting 300 of them at a time.

For those of you who are relatively or completely new to the Google Keyword Tool, the best settings to use when researching on it are:

• English/All Countries and Territories (in the “Results are tailored to” area) – This ensures you get the whole English segment of the world population vs. just the U.S.
• Don’t Show Ideas For New Keywords (need to click “Filter My Results” and click the checkbox next to it) – If we don’t have a readymade list like what we’ve generated through this Geo Keyword tool, then we would leave this unchecked, but since we have a list, we check this box.
• (after clicking “Get Keyword Ideas”) Match Type: Exact (right side above the listings) – If this is left as Broad, this data will include all of the terms that have these keywords and not just the search on these keywords alone – you don’t want that.
• Show: Estimated Avg. CPC (in the “Choose columns to display” dropdown menu above the match type) – This is very important – gives you a hint at how much advertisers pay for clicks on the term, which is about 3-5 times what you’d expect to get per click on a parked page.

You only have to set these settings the first time – Google remembers them afterwards. So after you run a batch of up to 300 keywords, you go to the bottom of the results and click “.csv (for excel)” to download the results into a .csv file. If you have more than 300 keywords, keep doing this on the next batches but copy the results from them into the first .csv file you created so you have them all in one spreadsheet.

So you have this Google Keyword Tool data – now what? First off, I personally use Domain Tools to check availability of domains because it hits the major 6 extensions and you don’t even need to feed it a list of domains – you can feed it a list of spaceless keyword phrases and it will still work. However, let’s say like many others you use GoDaddy’s bulk registration area for checking (it IS lightning fast for checking 500 domains at a time so I even sometimes use it). How do we get these [keyword phrases] into keywordphrases.com? Use these simple steps:

1. Select the entire column with the [keyword phrases] and hit the keys CTRL+F (brings up the “Find and Replace” window). Click the “Replace” tab
2. In the “Find what:” area, hit the space bar. Type nothing in the “Replace with:” area and just click “Replace All”. You’ll notice this will remove all spaces in the terms.
3. Do this again for the [ character to remove all the ['s from the keyword list.
4. Now type the ] character in “Find what:” but in “Replace with:” type in .com and click “Replace All”.

Voila: Your list of keywords became a list of domains! It’s just that simple, and it’s knowing how to do shortcut steps like this that help you maximize your research efforts. Knowing the best tips and tricks with working with lists, how to use tools, etc. helps me do probably 10+ times as much as most other domainers in the same amount of time. We have all this technology and automation to help us save time but hardly anyone uses it!

Now – what’s another mundane process that most domainers do (and all SHOULD do) that takes a lot of time? How about capitalizing their domains? Sure, it’s not time consuming if you have 10 domains but what about 1,000 domains? The fact is that it is absolutely crucial to present domains to potential buyers in capitalized form, meaning with each keyword in the domain being capitalized (VisitSanDiego.com for instance). Thankfully, there’s a keyword tool for that too so that you can automate the process, the Keyword List Cleaner also from PPC Classroom. The Capitalization feature automatically capitalizes the first letter of each keyword in the list of keyword phrases you put in. Regardless of HOW you are finding your domains, you should always be doing keyword research on them before getting them to find out the search #s and CPC, so this is actually useful even on domains you’ve found in expired domains lists, searches, etc. So with that thought in mind, here’s what you do:

• You get your list of keywords and run them through the Google Keyword Tool. Now in the .csv file you have [keyword phrases].
• Select the entire column, hit CTRL+F and click the “Replace” tab.
• Type [ in "Find what:" and nothing in "Replace with:" and click "Replace All"
• Type ] in “Find what:” and nothing in “Replace with:” and click “Replace All”
• Copy the keywords from the column and paste them into this Keyword List Cleaner and click “Capitalize”
• Copy the revised list of keywords back into the Excel sheet (if you just click over to it and hit CTRL+V, it should paste everything back in its rightful spot)
• Select the entire column again, hit CTRL+F and click the “Replace” tab.
• Hit spacebar in the “Find what: and nothing in “Replace with:” and click “Replace All”
• Insert a new column to the right of this column. The top keyword should be in cell A2 and now B2 should be a blank cell.
• In cell B2, paste the following formula: =CONCATENATE(A2,”.com”)
• Hit Enter, then click on cell B2 and double-click on the fill-down square on the bottom right of the cell. That should fill the concatenate formula all the way down for each keyword.

Voila: [keyword phrase] becomes KeywordPhrase.com…you have a CAPITALIZED list of domain names from a list of keywords! No longer do you have to do that MANUALLY for hundreds of domains! For example, just a couple days ago I had to present all of our financial domains to a potential buyer – over 500 of them total and they were all NOT capitalized so I had to go through all of them and manually capitalize them. If I were to go through this process of capitalizing domains whenever I do keyword research on them, I would have already had a list of capitalized domains. Incredibly annoying 1+ hours of monotonous work vs. the click of a mouse and about a minute of work in Excel, which is better?

This very same tool has another feature that also saves time for domain list gatherers: Remove Duplicates. Given domains show up repeatedly on expired domains lists thanks to domain tasting, this is a nice time and headache saving feature as well since we don’t want to keep researching the same domains over and over. There is a way to do it in Excel but it would take far too long to explain, and those of you not fond of Excel or who don’t have it can still make use of this tool’s feature.

To understand why these time-saving measures are important, I’ll share with you my 2 biggest keys to success in domains:

1. Conserving your time by maximizing your use of time through tips and tricks like the above. Anyone who’s been around in the early days of domains can tell you that the lack of convenience from both lack of powerful tools and lack of daily lists of expiring/expired domains and other things we take for granted made it MUCH harder. These days you can go through hundreds of thousands of domains in a day, but it ain’t magic – you have to know how to eliminate wasted time by using tools and software to automate tasks. You cannot “manually” go through a hundred thousand domains per day.
2. Scrutinizing each and every “good” domain you are considering getting, i.e. getting ONLY the best domains you can find. This is simply the difference between owning a quality portfolio and making nice sales/ROI vs. owning a weak portfolio and losing money from lack of sales. Selling domains is NOT easy – it’s incredibly tough, ESPECIALLY in times like this. The last thing you want to do is handicap yourself and your chances of making sales by getting subpar domains to begin with.

The combination of knowing how to go through tens or hundreds of thousands of domains a day and heavily scrutinizing them so that you’re getting at most a handful of domains a day is the key to maximizing your chances of success, especially when you’re starting out. Once you have more experience, you can then work on finding good deals in the aftermarket, but I believe right now especially with so many domains dropping, finding gems within expired and available domains holds a ton of opportunities. You can’t beat the ROI of selling a registered $8 domain for hundreds of dollars, and there’s far less risk than with buying names like LLL.coms (if you paid $8,000+ for one half a year ago, chances are it’s worth $4,000 or less today). With the keyword generating tools like the Geo Keyword tool and time-saving tool functions like the Capitalize function in the Keyword List Cleaner tool, both from PPC Classroom), there’s no reason not to take advantage of the vast opportunities at your fingertips.

ABOUT PPC CLASSROOM

The PPC Classroom tools mentioned in this article were actually a free BONUS included within the main product, which is about learning how to make gobs of money with Adwords and affiliate programs. PPC Classroom offers a free 30-Day Free trial and can cancel within it for no charge. They actually send you a DVD of material plus all the downloadable bonuses included within it (there’s 11 main ones and 9 additional “partner” products given for free), so you keep all that even if cancelling. The ability to use the tools however as well as the handholding by the PPC guru Amit Mehta and access to a slew of other important material is only while the account is active, and it costs $97/mo after the 30-Day Free Trial. It’s worth continuing just for the tools.

For anyone who would like to do more with their domains, this program delivers. Billions of dollars a year are made from affiliate programs and CPA networks, and most of the big players make most of their money through using Adwords to get the traffic into landing pages that get people to buy products or sign up for memberships. SEO takes a lot of time and is almost impossible to keep a handle on it unless you’re researching and reading all day long, but all it takes is a little upfront money to pay for some clicks in order to get started using Adwords to get traffic in. Once you find a fit and start making money on a campaign, the snowball effect happens – you reinvest the profits to make more and keep growing and growing. Amit was in dire straits himself when starting out making money this way (and he had to learn from scratch), and in less than a year he was making more monthly income than I make now in domains with my 5 years of domaining experience. Additionally, this is the 2nd PPC Classroom he has held…he has already created success in others with the first PPC Classroom, which is why the relaunch of it has been WILDLY popular.

This is why I myself am getting into it and why I think any domainer should heavily consider it. We have the upper hand over anyone else going through a program like this – we have keyword targeted domains perfect for using in ad campaigns, PLUS we already know the SEO benefits of having such domains and having even minor development on them. Instead of watching the pennies trickle in through parking revenue, you can grab the sacks of money sitting there in PPC/affiliate opportunities, and this program is chock full of the knowledge and resources you would need to do exactly that. I’m in the PPC Classroom already and I hope you’ll come join me!

admin Tips and Tricks domains, Tips and Tricks, tools

Bido.com, the 1 name a day starting at $1 with no reserve auction house, is starting up again soon! More importantly, my partner’s name which has been in line to be listed there for over half a year now will finally see the light of day! MyAstrologist.com will be on auction on Bido.com on February 26th. It should be an exciting auction for a great domain!

admin Domain Names, In the News, Limited Time Sales Bido, domains, sales

The DomainFest Extended Auction run by SnapNames.com is soon coming to an end, and we still have some great domain names in it that are waiting for new owners! The auction ends tomorrow, February 5th, 2009 at approx. 3:00 PM EST. The domains we have in this auction are:

BloodGlucoseMonitors.org – $590
CharityOrganizations.org – $950
CommercialMortgageRates.org – $590
DigitalVideoRecorders.org – $590
FundraisingCampaign.org – $950
MigraineTreatments.org – $950
Mp4Video.org – $590
PrescriptionDietPills.org – $590
PrescriptionWeightLoss.org – $590
RedemptionProgram.com – $590

If you don’t already have a free account at SnapNames, go here to create one (pretty simple process). Once you’ve done that, click here to reach the search screen for the DomainFest auction. To look up one of our listings, you can put in the entire domain into the search field and click “Search”.

There’s a couple of ways to put in a bid on a domain, but I’ve found that the best way is to first add it to your watch list. To do that, once you have brought up the listing through search, you would click on the binoculars icon on the right side of the listing. When you’re finished adding domains to your watch list, click on “View Watched” on the right side above the search listings. Once there, you can input your maximum bid in the fields indicated and click on “Place Bids” to get them submitted. If you by chance enter a bid under the minimum bid of the listing, your bid will fail and a popup will notify you of the minimum bid of the listing. All the prices listed above are the minimum bids on our listings.

If you have any questions, please let me know. Good luck to everyone participating!

Steve Domain Names, Limited Time Sales auction, domains, sale

Most of what I’ve learned in the world of domain names has come through my own experiences – and I mean mostly by trial-and-error.  New extension domain hype is certainly something I have not only witnessed time and time again, but have personally wasted a lot of money on in one particular occasion.  If you’re new to domain names, there’s one easy bit of advice you should know with buying or registering domain names: Stick with .com until you’ve got a better understanding of domain values.

Some of the advice I give is directly related to pitfalls I’ve experienced early on in my domaining career without having someone like my present self giving level-headed advice.  In the case of an overhyped new extension that lured ME in, it was .in.  Now, to my defense I WAS late with getting .in domains – a whopping 3 days late but that was enough to miss out on just about every .in domain of immediate value.  Keep in mind domain hacks weren’t all that uncommon back in early 2005, and that was one of my major focuses with getting .in domains at that point.  I could have easily dumped well over $2,000 on .in domains if I wasn’t careful – between the hype, the actual amount of domain registrations occurring (I think by the time I got to the extension, already over 100,000 domains had been registered) and the initial reaction I had to many names that were still available, the temptations were immense.

In the end, the damage done was about $800.  Only about 8 of the 40 or so domains I registered I still have to this day, and I haven’t sold a single one of them.  They ARE good domains worth keeping – MyName.in for domain hack opportunities (I liked it for name translations like MyName.In/Chinese), DownloadMusic.in (a very well searched term, but also domain hack friendly), Ninja.in (great 1-word domain that’s social media friendly in my opinion), but I just haven’t agreed in price with anyone on any of them as of yet.  Keep in mind – I still have what is by far the highest public sale of a .in domain, Poker.in for $60,000.  THAT domain I bought on the secondary market a few months after the .in extension release, and THAT of course ended up being a very smart play.  So it takes a lot for me to say my initial speculations in .in domains were off and that the extension was overhyped.

The extension I am most worried about newbies getting carried away with is .me.  Don’t get me wrong, it is cuter than the average extension by far and the domain hack possibilities are endless.  STILL, look at the lengths .tv has had to go through to get more widely accepted and see large sales, and that extension serves a viable purpose (TV related sites, advertisers on TV commercials, video related sites, etc.).  .me is primarily domain hack friendly and mildly social media friendly and that’s it.  Like .tv, it has very little behind it with the nation the extension represents.  .in on the other hand is similarly domain hack friendly and also represents the nation of a billion people which contains the largest English-speaking population in the world believe it or not.  .me was very smartly marketed by the registry and sites like GoDaddy, and it is mostly that marketing that resulted in the mass of .me domains that were registered and bought.  The prices some people are paying for .me domains that would under normal circumstances be questional domain registrations at best are obscene.  It’s as if their vision is back and is inserting a decimal in the price so they think $2000 is $20.00 – I have no idea how to explain it.

The POSITIVES I will say about the extension is that again it IS a pretty one, and also I have seen a lot of .me domains being DEVELOPED instead of parked – a lot more than I was expecting this soon after its release.  That coupled with the massive amount of registrations and a fair amount of nice sales of .me domains leads me to say there is still probably a good amount of .me names that are worth getting if the price is right.  However, I am seeing way too many people registering garbage .me domains or buying mediocre to at best decent .me domains for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.  I have a LOT of experience with country code extensions and I can tell you that they are MUCH harder to sell than extensions like .com and .org.  I once somewhat monopolized getting high quality single-word exotic country-code domains off of expiration – I would do hours of searching a day on the top keywords in various extensions and now and then hit paydirt.  However once even a couple others like me entered into the mix, it was no longer worth the time and effort – even with getting names that were undeniably worth thousands of dollars, the MARKET for them is considerably smaller – the extensions confuse Average Joe and despite the name being very short and nice looking, Average Joe loves his .com.

Bottom line, you should always heavily scrutinize any domain you may introduce into your portfolio.  In the case of new extensions, add an additional layer of scrutiny and especially limit how much you spend on such names.  Your wallet will thank you later.

Steve Domain Names, Tips and Tricks .in, .me, buying domains, ccTLDs, country code extensions, domain hype, Domain Names, new extensions, registering domains, Tips and Tricks