NameTrader.com

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!

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