A guide to buying, selling and leasing domain names
By Rupert Browne, of About the Computer.com
What is a domain name?
Identifying a domain name
Analyse Leads
Backordering
Advertising and selling your domain
Video tutorials
Helpful links
Domains marketplace powered by About the Computer.com
What is a domain name?
A domain is virtual online property which is unique to the registrant. It is not the same as web hosting and it is not your website.
You need both a domain and hosting to run a website. Hosting is a place on a web server where you upload and maintain your website. A domain is an easy way for people to find your website by typing a specific name into a web browser. For this reason, every domain name is unique. The easier it is to remember or more relevant your domain name is, the more valuable it can potentially be.
You never really own a domain, instead what you are really doing is leasing the domain name from the registrar. Usually you buy a domain for 1, 2, 5 or 10 year periods. You can renew or extend the domain anytime within that period of ownership.
If you don’t renew the domain name at the end of its term, the domain name will go in to a redemption period, if it is still not renewed before it is due to expire, the domain name will become available to anyone. If it is not renewed at all, it will become suspended, pending deletion.
Identifying a domain name
Every domain name is necessarily unique. However the world wide web is vast with current estimates of 136.3 million active domain names and almost 8 billion pages (at the time of writing - Friday, 20 January, 2012). It is to your advantage and potentially more lucrative to find a domain name that is both easy for visitors to remember and is relevant to your business or website subject matter. This will increase traffic to your website and in turn will boost your search engine rankings.
Because of this, web developers covet one-word domain names. They are in short supply and their single-word status grants them a kind of appeal that longer domains cannot compete with.
Just like buying an existing business in the real world, established domain names tend to fetch a higher price on the domain name marketplace, simply because they are already likely to be drawing visitors. Even if they provide little in the way of content or functionality, websites on established domains attract visitors to their pages through higher search engine rankings.
Another approach is to find a domain name that matches as closely as possible the most popular search terms entered into search engines by potential customers looking for goods and services. These are known as keyword or premium word rich domain names.
Keyword-rich domains by definition perform better in search engines but how do you find out what keywords are most popular in your chosen field? Thankfully Google Adwords provide an incredibly useful Keyword Search Tool that addresses precisely this problem. You can enter a keyword and generate a list of related search terms to find out how many people have used those terms in the past month. Then you can try find an available domain name that corresponds as closely as possible to the most popular terms.
Domains can vary in value wildly depending on its extension, with a .com (dot-com) extension still the most sought after. Unless you have a budget in excess of £64K ($100K), you will find it difficult to get a desirable .com name as most are already taken and rarely become available through the backorder process. If they do become available they usually attract a great deal of interest and will probably end up in an auction selling for huge amounts.
Perhaps instead it would be wise to concentrate on where your customers are, .co.uk for UK based transactions for example, or choose from one of the many domain extensions that exist to get a clue to specific identities... .co for companies, .org for organisations and charities, .org.uk for UK based organisations, .tv for television, .mobi for mobile.
Now you know what your looking for, your next step is to look through domain drop lists on pool.com, snapnames.com and namejet.com.
Analyse leads
Before you backorder a domain, you should analyse it for possible leads (potential customers), unless it is for your own future use. You don’t want to backorder a domain if there isn’t a lead. Typically there should be around 25 to 30 leads.
Look at whois.net to see how many identical or similar domains are already registered with other extensions. Who owns them? What companies have a similar domain that would benefit from your domain?
Try to stay clear of trademarks or possible violation of domain registration. You could end up with a fine of up to £129K ($200K).
Continue: A guide to domain names - Part 2
More: Helpful links
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