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Dabbling in Domaining

I was at a dinner party the other night when a friend started asking me if I knew anything about domaining. Here was a guy that works in a “real job” and knows nothing about Internet marketing, but he told me that he registered 10 domain names and had listed them on Sedo. When did mainstream folks start speculating in domain names? In any case, I was impressed that he managed to do what he did, even though he hasn’t yet made any money at it.

I’ve dabbled with domaining. Sometimes I like to try my hand at new businesses - it keeps me from getting stale and often I learn new skills that I can apply to my already established businesses. I set up a separate corp a few months ago, registered about 500 domain names, parked them, optimized them etc. I figured it was something I should at least experiment with. Has it been a wild success? No, but then again I devoted a total of about 5 work days to it. I did learn a lot in my experimentation, though. The two main goals are 1) to earn money from parked domains at Sedo or elsewhere and 2) to own a portfolio of quality names that someone might want to buy.

Course, everyone has some extra names that they registered and never used, too. I registered bimmerforum.com years ago ‘cause I wanted to start a BMW forum obviously . I never used the name so I put it up for sale on Sedo. Someone paid me $3,500 for it. I did the same thing with pricerate.com, which sold for several thousand as well. When you put your names on Sedo and get bids, first try to get the bidder to bid as high as possible – if they bid $100, come back with $2000, then they might bid $500 etc. Once they’ve bid as high as you think they will go, turn it into an auction – the buyer will be committed at their bid price and the auction could drive it higher.

Here are my tips to try your hand at domaining. You’d pay good money for a lot of these tips in one of the domaining ebooks out there so save your money and read these instead:

1. Register Popular/New Names and Phrases

Good luck registering pickles.com, makemoney.com, heck even sfoilspill.com is taken!. There are still great names to be had but identifying them requires creativity and a keen nose for what’s hot now and what will be hot later.

There was a video on Youtube the other day that was a mock translation of an Indian music video. The recurring phrase in the video was “Benny Lava”. I checked, bennylava.com was registered – someone was fast. Look for other viral videos as hints for good domains. Other good sources are current news sites and also gossip sites (TomKat.com or Bennifer.com anyone?).

Some search engines put out keyword trends (like Google Trends), stuff that people are searching for each day. This is a great source for domain ideas. There are even real time search feeds out there. A clever coder could write an app that reads in the real time search feed, filters out common words, and notes any sudden burst in popularity for a particular word or phrase as a possible contender for a domain.

2. Create a Perl Alexa Rank Checker

Create a Perl script to look at the top 1,000 (or however many you want to) U.S. Alexa ranked sites. Create common misspellings of each domain (plurals/singular, remove double letters, etc), and check to see if each test name is registered. Register them, park, test. Yes, another reason to learn to code!

3. Taste the Names!

Use eNom.com to register your names and take advantage of the 5 day domain drop window to drop the name and pay only $0.25 to “taste” the name. This way, you buy the name, park it, and if it fails to perform, drop it. I believe the only way to drop the name is to use their API interface but I think you can access it via a URL and pass the proper parameters to drop the domain if you don’t know how to code. Remember: if you pay $8 to register a name, your name needs to generate at least $0.02/day to break even and it’s only worth keeping if it generates north of that UNLESS you’re confident that it’s an amazing name that someone might want to buy but that kind of speculation is often risky and expensive so I recommend sticking with making sure the domain makes money.

4. Check dropped domain lists

This is a task best left to coding and automation, because otherwise, manually scanning lists of thousands of domains every day will turn you into a wreck. Every day there are thousands of domains that expire and are dropped from registrars, and lists are available. Key them into a Perl script and use Alexa’s web services to check the rank for each – if it ranks, it could still have people visiting it and could be worth registering. Keep in mind that a lot of these dropped domains could be names that other domainers “tasted” for 5 days and dropped them as junk, so just be picky about what you scoop up. You have to be quick to register great names – you might consider a service like snapnames.com to help, though they aren’t cheap. Otherwise, you might be able to write yourself a script that tries to register the name over and over again via an API like enom offers, until you are successful. Trying to manually register a quality dropped domain will be frustrating because you’re competing with a bunch of other savvy domainers doing the same thing.

5. Have a Friendly Trademark Policy

If you register googles.com, be prepared for an eventual legal conflict. Keep in mind though that most domain holders are oblivious to even common misspellings, so this isn’t always a huge deal. But if you do get confronted by a legitimate trademark holder, either drop the name (if it’s within the 5 day window – some trademark holders are constantly looking for new registrations that violate their marks and will contact you immediately after registration) or offer to turn the name over to them.

6. Setup a Separate Corporation

(And use a PO Box). Don’t risk your main business or worse, your personal finances, with domaining. Even if everything you’re doing is 100% legit, moral, ethical, and you have no intention of registering a name that comes anywhere close to anyone’s trademark, that doesn’t mean someone won’t try to file a claim against you anyway. LegalZoom is a quick and easy way to setup a corp, just beware that they will try to charge you an annual fee of $100+ to be the corporation’s registered agent if you don’t opt out of that. It’s kind of a pain to have separate corps because they have to have separate bank accounts and tax returns so be aware of that too. If you don’t keep everything separate then you’re wasting your time even setting up a separate corp.

7. Make Sure You Optimize Your Parked Domains

Take advantage of Sedo’s (or another parked service) optimization interface to enter keywords that are relevant to each domain, pick a picture, etc.

So… If you have a bunch of names you don’t plan to use, do make sure they’re listed on Sedo. You never know who might want to buy them. But if you do decide to try your hand at domaining, start small and don’t get in over your head. From my experience, it is not a simple business to break into and will take patience, creativity, and time to build, like anything.

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Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 3:07 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.