Cool New Website, and My Thought of the Day

Hey everyone, I found a website that is giving out domain name reselling tips, maybe it’ll help you. I read through the 1 or 2 pages and didn’t find anything I don’t already know, but the information was good.

Here’s my thought of the day: How do you get started trading domains? Well, it’s simple. You’ve gotta get yourself some capital from somewhere. Your first job, a stimulus check, from your mom, it doesn’t really matter. Once you’ve got that capital to start investing in domain names with, you should look for some great domain deals. If you find any good deals, (covered in my previous post, about deals) you need to buy them. Again, don’t buy anything less than premium domain names. If you buy bad domains, you won’t be able to sell them off in the future. Our goal is to find great domains, then transform them into amazing ones. Once you’ve transformed your domains by parking them/doing SEO/ or whatever else you may personally do to a domain, then it’s time to sell it for more than you bought it. Once you’ve sold off all your domain deals, take some of the money you made and invest in more domains. It’s that easy! Follow some of my previous blog posts and you will understand more. Have fun, domainers.

Thoughts from a Domainer.

I haven’t posted in a while, figured I’d update the blog with some more of my thoughts.

Anyway, I was thinking about how a person could find great domain deals online, and it occurred to me that you can’t always get a great deal. Sometimes you have to settle for something expensive. If you want to make the big bucks domaining, you can’t just buy a bunch of bargain domains and try to hawk them to random visitors, nobody wants the garbage domains. Sometimes it’s important that you spend money to make money. What I mean by this is that if you see a premium domain that you can grab for 250 dollars, it would be stupid not to take it. If you can buy a premium domain for under 500, there’s always a chance to make some serious profit. Anything up to 500 for a premium domain can usually be doubled.

Anyway, that’s my thought for the day. Basically, don’t waste too much time looking for great domain deals if you don’t truly think they exist.

Finding a Premium Unregistered Domain Name

When you’re looking for a good premium domain that has not been registered, it’s important to do some deep thinking. What good generic domain could be modified to create a premium domain? What kinds of things can you add to a domain that’s been taken to register one that hasn’t been taken?

Let’s take ‘generic.com’ for example. Generic.com is already registered by Joe Schmoe, and he’s declined your offer of $150 dollars to buy his domain. What do you do next? Add on some extra letters to the domain and try to get a premium domain out of it. Say we add ‘dn’ to the end of ‘generic’ and create ‘genericdn.com’. We’ve just created a premium domain! DN could stand for loads of things. It’s a very flexible domain.

What if we want to get a premium domain, and don’t want to waste time adding or subtracting letters because it just looks odd? We hit up the thesaurus. A thesaurus is a wonderful tool because it helps describe a word with another word. Say we wanted to register ‘acrobat.com.’ Of course, acrobat.com is taken, so we look to the thesaurus. In our thesaurus, we see that another word for acrobat is ‘aerialist’. Not bad, but not quite good, either. We look again, and this time we see ‘tumbler’. That’ll do. It’s not quite ‘acrobat’, but it is better than aerialist. And so, tumbler.com is born.

Sometimes it’s not possible to find a premium unregistered domain. This is when we search for domains getting ready to ‘drop’ – or become unregistered/expired soon. You can pick up certain domains by placing a ‘backorder’ on them. A backorder request tries to register a domain name for you automatically once it expires, but this doesn’t always work. One cool tool I found is DropHunt. It allows you to search for domains that are getting ready to expire. Find some good ones, and you may have hit some easy money.

That’s it for today, check back tomorrow for more tips and blog entries.

YouTube Update, And My Thought of The Day.

Hey everyone, I’m just posting to let you all know that I have a youtube page and regularly post videos there. My username is TheDomainDude and you can click there to see the videos I’ve made, or head on over to the videos link on the blog.

Feel free to follow my account and see what gets posted next. It will most likely be some cool tips for your domain.

While I’m still writing, I want to give you my thought of the day on what makes a ‘good’ domain name. First off, there’s a lot of words out there that can become a domain, and it should be obvious that not all of them are great choices.  One interesting thing is that even with some of the bad domains, a company looking for something simple to remember could pick up a no good domain and turn it into a search engine (I’m talking about ‘bing’ here.) So sometimes having a few premium ‘bad’ domains is a good idea. Premium in this case meaning under 8 letters, although the above also applies to super premium domains that are generic (like example.com.)

So what makes a good domain? Mostly length, and memorability. I covered these in another blog post, where I talked about appraising domains, but I didn’t really emphasize how important those two factors really are. Other factors also bring value to a domain, such as how generic a domain is, but if a company is looking for a new name, something generic might be what they are looking for. In essence, if a domain looks premium, it probably is.

What To Do: A Noob’s Guide

If you’re new to being a domainer, you need to read this entry. I’m going to go through what a noob needs to do to get started trading domains.

Part 1. Buy domains. You’ll never become a professional domain trader if you do not have any domains in your possession to sell and create revenue from. You’ll want to purchase ‘good’ domains. Don’t buy a bad domain even if it’s cheap, nobody will buy that kind of domain later on.

Part 2. Increase visitors to your domain. Do a bing query to get some easy optimization methods that should help build traffic to your domain. Once you have got enough web traffic linking in to your domain, you can park it online, and begin creating a little revenue before a serious buyer comes along and snatches your site up.

Part 3. Put your domain up for auction. This is easy to do, simply find an auction site that isn’t eBay. eBay is bad for us domainers because we hawk a virtual item. If a buyer initiates a chargeback once they receive the domain, you’re going to lose your money. And also the domain.

Step 4. Transfer ownership. After your domain has been sold, you will need to transfer ownership to the new owner. Don’t do this before receiving your money, of course. Different registrars have different methods to transfer ownership. On GoDaddy it’s as simple as pressing the ‘change owner’ button in your account. It’s different on every domain registrar. It’s necessary to research this area on your own, unfortunately.

Step 5. Purchase many different domain names with your new found wealth. A good rule of thumb is to spend 90% of your revenue buying new domains, and keeping 10% for yourself. Once you’ve completed the next domain deal, lower this down to 80%, and then 70%, and finally whatever you like. It’s important to spend about 90% of the capital on buying extra domains, however, because you’re just a fledgling domain trader and you will need a big bag of domains when you finally start to sell domain names.