How To Choose Good Domains For Investing And Getting Profits	1.3/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Elva June 18, 2009

Why a domain name need be choosed First for Domain Investing?

As I’ve posted before, The Top Domain Name Sales Ever As You can see, These Domains are Most Expensive than others, so, if you wanna be a domain investor, you should know how to choose the domain names.

Which to choose? .com? .net? .info? .org? … …

Here are the common domain extensions, not including the county codes:

- .aero – The top level domain designated for the air transport industry, available only to aviation community members.

- .biz – The .biz top level domain is a designated suffix for businesses. Domains using the .biz extension must be used for business or commercial use.  It’s not really an enforced rule though.

- .com – Short for commercial. Domain names with the .com extension are the most popular and can be purchased by any individual or business in any country.

- .coop – This top level domain is available to cooperatives, cooperative service organizations and wholly owned subsidiaries of cooperatives.

- .edu – The top level domain is designated for four-year, degree-granting colleges and universities.  Anyone can not just register an .edu domain.

- .gov – The top level domain designated for agencies and branches of the United States Federal Government. State and local governments in the United States should use the us top level country code domain. Only the US goverment can register these.

- .info – .info domains are available to the general public.

- .mobi – These are reserved for mobile internet pages.

- .mil – Reserved only for the US military.  Common citizens can not register these.

- .museum – This top level domain is available only to museums, museum organizations and individual members of the museum profession.

- .name – Available to the general public, .name email addresses are listed as [email protected] or [email protected]. Web sites are listed as www.firstname.lastname.name

- .net - Short for .network. This domain extension was originally designed to be used by technical web sites. However, this extension can be registered by anyone.

- .org – Short for .organization. Originally for non-profit organizations that did not fit under the .com or – .net extension. However any individual or business may now register a .org domain name.

- .pro – The .pro suffix was created for certified professionals including lawyers, doctors and accountants.

- .tv – This suffix is for the use of television related domains.

Why .com domains are so much better then all the other extentions?

As you can see above, every single $1 million + domain name which sold was a .com.  Why are .coms values so much higher then the other .net’s, .org, .biz, .cn, etc?  There are several reasons but they all step from the fact that .com’s were the original set of domains released by ICANN.  When you think of the internet you think .com.  If you were looking for a website about hummingbirds, you would likely type in hummingbirds.com instead of hummingbirds.net or hummingbirds.us, wouldn’t you?  This is because the brain is wired to remember .com over everything else.  Every 2 and 3 letter/number combination of .com domains are taken, and soon every 4 letter .com will be taken.  Think of it this way.  Everyone wants to live in New York City (The .com of the Northeast US) because they work there, but the real estate is very high there because of the demand, and the fact that all property is already taken.  Thus people often have to settle for the next best thing, living in New Jersey, or the suburbs of New York (the .net, and .org areas of the metropolitan.)  Because of this the suburb real estate (.net and .org domains) may be above average but not nearly as high as in the city (.com) itself.  The rest of the extensions, which include, .biz, .mobi, and every country code would be considered rural areas where land is fairly cheap and available.

Things to watch out when buying a domain:

- First you must make sure that the owners claims are true.  They may give you traffic stats, but how do you really know they are the stats for this site.  It is easy to take a sceen shot of something and then manipulate it.  This is why the use of an Escrow is important.  All the big domain name marketplaces are escrows themselves, such as sedo.com, and afternic.com.  If you are making the transaction privately, away from one of these domain marketplaces, then we recommend you use http://Escrow.com as a way to protect yourself from fraud.

- There is also another issue buyers can run into.  What if the domain name was stolen by the current owner, and he sells it to you, only to have the real owner come back and claim it from you.  You are then out the money you paid, the original owner gets his domain back, and the jerk who sold it to you walks away with cash.  Although this practice is rare, it should always be considered.  This is why it is important to check the whois history of the domain.  See if it has changed hands recently, and if there are any other oddities in the information.  You can get the history going back 7 years at http://www.whois.sc for a small fee.

- If a domain name is being sold because of it’s traffic, it is very important to know for a fact where the traffic is coming from.  If the owner claims that all their 1000 uniques per day is from type in traffic, but he is really just buying cheap traffic to make it look as though the site is getting targeted type-ins, then you are bound to overpay for the domain.  What we recommend is that before releasing the funds from the escrow, put a tracker on the domain name and track where the visitors are coming from for at least 36 hours.  If you don’t see anything suspicious then go ahead and release the funds from the escrow to close out the purchase.

Things to look for and do when investing in a domain for the long term:

- .Coms are at least 10 times more valuable then any other extension.

- Shorter the domain the better

- Think “Brandability”. Can a company center it;s entire business around this domain?

- Don’t get caught up in the “Invented Name” trend. Even though sites like Google, and yahoo flourish, thats only because they have huge name recognition from their search engine services.

- Domains need to be remembered. Don’t expect people to remember a domain name such as robscrazypizzabeef.com.

- Don’t fall in love with a domain, there are millions of others out there.

- Always make an offer for less then the sellers ask price. Most Sellers expect to go down in their price, often as much as 50%.

- Don’t sell too soon. Especially with .com domains, there is no real end in site to their upsurge.  There are risks, but the gains outweigh the risks.

- Do your research. Goto the various domain marketplaces and see what similar domains are getting.

When evaluating a potential domain name look at it in terms of how memorable and targeted it is to a certain industry.

For example:

-Maps.com (There are zero items to remember specifically. Maps is generic & .com is the default extension.  This domain is also very targeted and extremely easy to remember)

-SanDiego.tv (One item to remember – extension tv)
-Bizness.com (One item to remember – Bizness referring to Business)

-eDrywall.us (Two items to remember – .us extension & e in front.)

-Righto.com (One item to remember – brandability of “Righto”)

- Weirdo-Pictures.com (Two items to remember. “weirdo” & the hyphen “-”)

There are risks, however in the domain market, just like every other market out there.  Here are some of the risks you must consider before spending a ton of money on domain names:

- Internet users are getting smarter. If you are buying domains based on Type-in traffic be careful.  People are getting smarter now-a-days and instead of typing bobcat.com into their browser, they goto Google and search for bobcat info.

- The Market is beginning to become saturated with sellers, while buyers are increasing at a lower rate. Some investors have literally over 200,000 domain names.  With new extensions coming out all the time, stick with the .com’s mainly.

- Internet users could become more dependent on large corporate sites which serve as their own little internet ecosystems. Think wikipedia.com.  If you want information on a subject you go there instead of another domain name.  A few large players could make the internet consolidate, devaluing domain names.

- Technologies change constantly. Who knows maybe we will have an entirely different form of sharing information, that does not use the internet, sometime in the next 20 years.

General Tips For Domain Name Investors and or Flippers

- Even though Hyphens can seem like a good idea for a domain name, the unhyphenated version of the domain will always be much more valuable and get a good amount of traffic from people who meant to goto the hyphenated domain.  For example CarForum.com is much better than Car-Forum.com.  There are a few exceptions to this rule, in cases of words or common phrases that are known with hyphens in them.

- Before registering a domain, say it out load a few times.  Is the domain name easy to remember if you heard it on the radio, on tv or on the phone?  If not, then reconsider.

- Be careful, don’t search for domains that you don’t plan on registering immediately.  Many of the domain registrars sift through the lists generated from searches and register any domains they feel are good buys.  This is called “Domain sniffing”.  If you find a good domain is available, buy it right away rather then waiting a week or two, or even a day or two.  Having said this, Moniker’s domain search tool seems pretty trustworthy and private.

- Never regret a sale for longer than a few seconds. If you find out later that the name was worth more, and the buyer would’ve paid more, consider your “loss” as money well-spent on a lesson well learned.

- Use the Internet archive page search at http://www.archive.org to check out the history of any domain name you intend on registering or buying from someone else.  Also make sure it is not banned by Google.  You don’t want to buy a site with a negative history, ie porn, warez, etc if you are making it into a blog about child obesity.

- Don’t trust the free online appraisal sites.  The figures they spit out are extremely inaccurate and don’t take into consideration some of the most important factors in valuing a domain name.

Here are some tools you may find helpful in the domain name business, that we didn’t already mention above:

- http://www.dnslocator.com – Handy tool that lets you look all domains and websites that are hosted on a specific nameserver.

- http://www.midano.com – Finds the best prices for registars dependent on the extension of the domains you are looking for.

- http://www.Nameboy.com – Really fast and easy tool for finding the right available domain names.

- http://www.pcnames.com – This if the best way to just try finding random good domains.  Type letters and it instantly suggests domains and lets you know if what you typed is available.

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