Now, if you were looking for some way to spend a lazy Saturday, or maybe just needed something to do while waiting at the airport maybe you should consider domain squatting. Back before the first bubble, a great domain was one that you could plaster all over a billboard. It was a name like Amazon or eBay. Taking a nod from terrestrial marketing, it was any name that was both brandable and easy to remember.

Eventually, like most great things, that Wild West of web development ground to a halt, and people became more practical. Now a great domain name is anything that the great unwashed masses (see: us) will enter into their browsers at a statistically higher than average rate. Thus, mortgage.com or business.com are much more valuable in today’s landscape than bindu.com.

This guide is for the domain broker in all of us, it will take you through finding a domain, registering it and possibly even making a ton of cash off of your next big find.

Finding A Name

Most people believe that all the great names have been taken, and those people are mostly correct. I am not going to lie to you, between domain squatters, splogs and a host of legitimate and illegitimate web enterprises, a large amount of the really great names are under the control of someone who is not you.

That doesn’t mean you can’t find a diamond in the rough.

Lets say that you want to make a site about the Real Estate. Your first bet might be to pick a name like Houses.com or Homes.com. A quick look at GoDaddy will tell you that both of these names are quite taken. If you took a better look, you’d realize that the cost of these names is probably just about the valuation of any project that you could come up with to use them. With that in mind, it’s time to step back and understand your market more fully.

When you really think about it, you’ll realize that what you actually want to do is rent homes to people living in New Jersey and the surrounding areas. Alright, time to check on the availability of NewJerseyHomes.com. Once again, you come up with nothing.

Honestly, you could go to .org or .net domains and probably have better luck, but the internet is a percentages game. People are much more likely to type in .com than they are .org or .net. When possible, stick with .com domains.

A final assessment of our current problem leads you to realize that your business is based on the Newark housing market, with this in mind you try NewarkHomeRental.com and behold, you have found yourself a match.

The point of this exercise was that purchasing a good domain is all about understanding exactly what you want. The more specific you can be, the more likely you are to find a permutation that is still available.

More tips

• Try adding or removing the ‘s’. NewarkHomeRentals may not be available, but NewarkHomeRental is.
• Take your time. Sometimes it’ll take quite a few tries to find a good domain, don’t give up.
• Avoid numbers, extra letters and extraneous characters — they make you look unprofessional.
• Use .com where possible, unless you have a really easy to remember name like del.icio.us, but even they have a .com now.
• Make it memorable. If it can’t be absolutely descriptive make certain it’s original.

Buying A Domain

Now that you have your name, it’s time to go through the process of actually purchasing a domain. Since GoDaddy is my favorite domain brokerage (see: sponsor) we’ll use them for this example.

First thing to do, is to go to www.GoDaddy.com
(get $2 off domain registration here).

Search

Once there, start a domain search for your award winning name. Again, stick with the better known top level domains. You’ll thank me in six months.

Now it’s time to create an account, the usual name entering rigmarole aside, this is pretty standard fare. While we’re at this step, let me just tell you that while I love GoDaddy for domain registration their hosting leaves something to be desired. Be aware.

Standard, Business, Private, Huh?

These settings determine how much of your personal information is put into the WHOIS database. WHOIS is to web pages what the yellow pages are to phone numbers. It gives you the full contact information of the registrant. Generally, if you don’t want this information to be publicly available it would be best to go with “Private” registration. This will cost you about a dollar extra.

If you don’t care, then chances are it won’t make much of a difference anyway.

Avoid the Upsell

This is about the point in your domain buying experience where GoDaddy will try to upsell, adding everything from Web Hosting to Email to SEO. My suggestion, keep your eyes on the prize and skip all of the cruft. If later you want to go back and purchase these additional features do so when you really have the need.

Checkout

The final step is to decide how long you want to keep the name. My suggestion for those who are trying to make a business of collecting domains is to keep it at a year. If you can’t flip your purchase in that long, you would do well to move onto greener pastures.

Flipping Your Name

There are a number of places you can go to buy and sell domains, even Godaddy has options. However, one of the better domain brokerages in the market is Sedo.

The Sedo brokers will help you buy, sell, park and trade domains. They have services available in ten languages and most importantly they have a huge number of users, meaning that their auctions are likely to get more traffic than if you used a smaller domain broker.

I don’t count myself as a domain selling expert, but a few tips to get you started are:

• Higher PR means higher price.
• More traffic means higher price.
• Quality content and price are not directly correlated.

The point is that people who purchase domains are looking for high traffic sites with advertising potential, in general. It doesn’t matter what is actually there as much as it does how many people you have managed to drive. This is one of the few instances where content is not necessarily king, but it never hurts to provide useful information with all your web ventures. You might find that the site itself is more valuable than the price you could get in the resale market.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Just to whet your appetite, here are a few of the most lucrative domain sales:

Not surprisingly Sex.com tops out the list. It was purchased in 1994 and sold in 2005 for $12 Million.

Porn.com is the next on the list at $9.5 Million. This deal was brokered by Moniker.com and it stands as the largest all cash domain sale in history.

Business.com comes in next. ECompanies Venture Group, headed by former Disney executive Jake Weinbaum, purchased it for $7.5 Million.

Diamonds are forever, and for Diamond.com and it’s entire inventory Ice.com paid an almost reasonable $7.5 Million in 2006.

Rounding out the list at $7 Million is Beer.com which was sold to Belgium based Interbrew, the world’s second larger brewer by volume.

The lesson here? Well, I guess you can draw your own lessons from the top selling names. If you have other tips for buying or selling domain names be sure to tell us here.

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