Domain Owl

The 2011 Domain Fest event garnered a small bouquet of winners. Moniker (formerly Snapnames) has posted the results. For Fijiislands.com, a $58,830.00 sticker price is fairy impressive, the standout sale of the auction. Longish name propertyappraisal.com fetched $23,530.00. An organic name, the totally potentially awesome organictea.com earned $17,650.00, a big hint to all those name searchers looking for “organic” revenue.

I’d like to see typo traffic for brassieres.com, which sold for $3,112.00. A more abstruse name, dialectic.com, earned $2,500. The multiuse product name generic, cables.info, did pretty well for a /info name, nabbing $1,315. An unusual entry shows that country code names are dead with the right shorty domain, to wit, staff.me got bid for $1,250.

The conventional wisdom about only short names selling coms under fire after news of th this next sale. The Long long domain name wirelesssecuritycamera.com got $830, this could be huge because the market for this generic product has highly specialized tiers of price ranges. Wirelesssecuritycamera.com is a long domain name but can be promoted and marketed with keywords or used as a forward.

Product based domain names can be Amazon stores or review sites, or with a little imagination real communities for product interface comparison and upgrade sourcing. Every try finding an upgrade or patch for your product Wouldn’t it be nice if you could Google your unit and get the patch or upgrade link or file at one website?

Net hitter cyberbargains.com earned, $750, a good hint to scout out cyber- starting names or cerate one for revenue or marketing. That is a real nice price for such a generic and promotable name. You can practically hear the Facebook calling. The winter product based domain name newskis.com schussed outta the rack for $675.

These name sales should illumine the sales process and value generation plan for domainers looking to leverage online web site publishing tools and resources for value creation in domain name investment.

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Do you need a second home (Page)? I say this because Twitter, Facebook, and so many blogs have replaced the need for a personal webpage. I credit MySpace with building a template non-web personnel could use, but the creativity of customizing a Facebook page is fairly limited. The reason these social networking sites became popular was due to the bridge between the average user’s skills and their impatience to have a site online for further marketing and promotion.
The best-known blogger I visit online have very unoriginal and unappealing blog templates, the worst of them covered with ads. You might think it’s unusual for a domainer to take issue with ads on a website, but when they clearly dominate the message, text and graphics, I do. When a website looks like a race car and not a greeting card, there is a design issue present and a business driver manipulating the creative decision making.
Ning did this well, but tried to shove a business template and online portal programming burden onto hobby users, and tried to leverage near-business users into using social network look page templates. But I never understood why so much convergence towards a unified set of puzzle pieces was supposed to be acceptable, let alone desirable. Remember when a website might involve your own favorite color, or have a picture of a place you’d like to live someday, or even a few flowers or keepsakes? The personalization of websites has been washed away. And for many people there are simply too many choices.
You can find a bunch of templates for blogs, but the one you’d like to use for personnel expression doesn’t really fit the business website you’ll be pouring all your effort into. This is why so many people have a Facebook page and a blog and a main website but none of them seem s really express them completely. And at the very end of the day, the domain name you thought was so clever that night at 3 a.m. when you bought it, doesn’t gel with your PTA network or online gaming community friends or your out of town clients.
In the rush to get everybody online, more than few originality and personal optimization corners have been cut. And then you have the small business web design client, who thinks they need a $45,000 website and refuses to look at any of the 350+ shopping cart software programs applications on the market. For business professionals with a lot of different things in the hopper, the answer is a second home page. It’s so much less work than trying to build the be-all end-all of all websites, which brings so many collaborative online projects to a halt.
The first step is deciding on a domain name. Right now drop lists are bursting with bargains, and a new site allows you to skim the possibilities without paying a steep domain auction listing fee. For many domainers, those extra $30-$50 in charges can make the difference between a spate of hopeful domain name renewals or a final throwing in the of the domaining towel. But the idea of creating a unique online presence for many has long since vanished. The haste to use templates, launch an app, bring together an email list or Twitter user group has almost abolished the creativity still possible online. For the outside the box thinker who starts making  truly original pieces of code again, here’s to you.

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There is a unique opportunity taking place now, and savvy entrepreneurs can act to secure real profits and increase over value. The herd in the domain world can tend to run in the same direction, but some key value elements might make a big difference when scanning droplists or making offers on auctioned names. The actual name and keyword combination is still important, but attaining a key name in the “other” realm of TLD’s is obviously newly profitable.

If the auction sales from DomainFest show one thing, it’s that no assumption about a TLD being valueless in the future is accurate. Dot Me names (from the CCTLD for Montenegro) and the newly minted .CO landslide (from the CCTLD of Columbia) may be hidden investment gems. The UDRP landscape is filling up with trademarks, and the domain holder who brands their own CCTLD along with a possible primary dot com dot net or dot org, can win the domainers stakes.

The census years ago was that (whether domainers will admit it or not) .US was really just an also-ran in the domain space. Many domainers who had invested were tearing their hair out over so much “wasted” investment. They must have read the Domainfest report with sackcloth and ashes.
Here are some name sales. Trafficjam.com sold for $11,500. Kiss.me sold for $10,000. Love.me sold for $32,000. Won.com was the big winner with a $115,000 payday, a great sale for a three letter dot com. The very timely name BridgeLoan.com sold for $27,500. Damages.com went for $25,000. LoanQuotes.com sold for $75,000. Those are some healthy name sales.

Dot US names had a premier place in domainer’s hearts, simply because a huge tranche of domainers actually live and work in the United States, thus using the country code TLD in a manner according to the reasons it was formed. The CCTLD names in the past were bought in a flurry of gold rush activity. But if the five figure domain sales reported from last week tell domainers anything, it’s that this week’s unwanted TLD name is going to be valued much higher in few years, perhaps even months. Time to get cracking picking up those “dollar” domains.

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Domain name buying and selling is an industry, with good luck and bad luck and hard times like everything else. Long Term domain investors have learned by now not to put faith in empty promises and get rich quick schemes.  Quick recovery financially is not a guaranteed result nor is a cash windfall for every domain purchased and developed into a website.

New domainers should evaluate their best method to break into the domain name game and crack open some profit possibilities. Various approaches can be performed to break into domaining, and some are better for an individual or for a group of investors or a team of web promoters. Marketing can get the word once a site is developed and launched, but that has to be a preplanned adjunct to site development and launch.

Wordtracker Customers Get More Visits to their Websites… Find Out How.

The speed of the investment capital outlay on a domain name will start the clock on the return of investment-plus-profit scenario. Therefore a conservative domain investment strategy will put less pressure on the individual operator or project team members. A more aggressive capital recovery strategy makes every keystroke operate at a higher premiums that some campaigns cannot equal.

Different domain names will have a wider audience at different times, such as annual sporting event (Olympics) or in certain seasons (travel sites).  Ongoing steady url advancement is  the ultimate goal. The investment in time and resources during different times of the year and in anticipation of a wider and faster clicking audience online should be integrated into the domain name publicity and marketing plan.

Achievable goals in traffic building, social network attention and link building can set the stage for larger campaign to follow. Each name may have different attributes better for some methods of domain promotion than others. A catchy buzzword and flashy logo will draw some users out of curiosity, while other sites may bring only discoverability with intense keyword seeding and SEO element density.

Monetary clickthroughs trail from these dynamics. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Google, Ebay, or Yahoo. Each of those domains started as press releases and conversation starter tidbits about what the site was all about. Breaking down results from day to day domaining tasks can bring the domain name owner’s value growth goals to fruition.

Having a site is essential in today’s domain market. For those domain investors relying on parking and traffic hits, the risk is palpable. Now more than ever web users and browsers online are looking for a content result or website experience with depth and individualized options. The most basic web user is puzzled and disappointed by a parking page online, and they know they can find amusement and information elsewhere and navigate owner

A parking page or registrar sponsored landing page signals disinterest on the webmaster side, and is matched by a complementary response in the end user. the template and site builders available inside virtually every hosting plan make a index page or parking placeholder a statement of neutrality that forms an assault on an expectant end user.

Searching end users will refer to buzz already being reported about the site from other channels.  If no press release or meta tags exist, the discoverability  for the site  (and the domain)  is too low. There must be a plan to cement the domain’s footprint with associated text and keywords in dozens of spaces online before true stickiness can be tested. Patterns of clicks online from the promotional material to the destination site must be grooved for future users and search engine bots to follow.

Simply trying to monetize a domain with no site behind it is risky and leaves  a bad taste in the mouths of end users looking for a online destination and a web experience. Guerrilla marketing works best with some “flavor” behind it, something to do or see when typing in the domain name as an url address online. Intense investor or sponsor efforts must be matched by a seamless, clean designed site with solid content elements to recommend it.

A projection of formal development of a domain name, and the tools and individuals using them should be assigned and plotted. Even a pencil and paper three month plan can get the wheels rolling under a domain inspiration or grassroots blog project. These calendar notations can be edited and rescheduled.

Domain promotion and marketing is time consuming. Just organizing a SEO optimization strategy draws time and energy from team members or the individual webmaster or site programmer. Milestones such as traffic peaks and click volumes should be the goals. Revenue of the affiliate and offers links will follow if the primary goal of site traffic and domain discovery is developed.

Some investors take the plunge into immediate name investment, sometimes in the auction and premium domain name arena. The investment scenarios should be matched with equal investment in formal link exchanges, content adding, text SEO and code density keyword optimization, and clean design for end users. For domain value growth, marketing and promotion benefit when there is more site product to to “sell”.

Each domain project is different, but the thirst for success is the same everywhere. Working through the various challenges and domain name elements is what distinguishes experienced domainers and long term domain investors from hobbyists looking to strike cash flow without effort. When online traffic, public interest, SEO value and a launched site follow the domain purchase, the domain name  investment is sure to pay off.

This article was previously posted.

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Active domainers are watching the auction sales and seeing massive big ticket name sales this week and thinking about putting their Internet names on the block. But the best value estimator data for domain name sales comes from traffic and backlinks and pings from other websites of equal or greater page rank. Assuming a website is of low page rank or remains somewhat undeveloped, any linking activity will benefit the name value.

See the previous post regarding the top websites online in terms of web visitor traffic. These sites, each one of them, is a SEO weapon you can use to promote any website or domain name link. Most of them are open account and free use sites. That’s a free ad on websites of top page rank at which you can put links of your choice on. This list of top websites should be a shopping list of places to cement web links to your targeted domain.

When a domainer with SEO goals reviews the traffic referrers for a specific domain name, they should check through this list for that domain name. Any of these high volume urls that do not appear in the web traffic list go to the top of the to-do list for that domain name. Hand picked url planting works infinitely better than mechanized backlinking because the traffic is organic and naturally occurring. Yet so few domainers actually do it.

Why post your link on these popular websites? A host of good reasons. Those monster traffic websites will channel bots and visitors to your sites and hike your page rank along with the millions of dollars they spend ramping up their own. If you place an ad write a review or list an item with a proper link back to your store, that’s a promotional that can only help your site. These actions are often only briefly screened or scanned before publication.

No domainer should list a domain name at a drop list, online auction or bidding d threawithout consulting some of these sites. No domainer who claims an aggressive approach to value building can afford to skip this step in domain marketing. Even targeting five of these websites and systematically incorporating their website url over a period of three to six months will show tangible page rank improvement.

Buyers that domainers want to bid on their names will do this review. They will wonder why an aggressive price is asked from a domainer who clearly hasn’t attempted the sale marketing efforts they themselves would use. Right the most savvy of domainers are using serious strategies to target end users for traffic, product sales and site name value increase for domain resale.

Time to review your domain name strategy. Per domain name, check through this list, using a graph chart or Excel spreadsheet. There should be a pattern of websites represented by the websites used for promotion. This report should be used as a visual reminder to market websites. The density of scatter dots on a list of domain names and the cross listed pivot list of popular websites should tell their own story regarding the domainers’ real efforts toward domain name promoter.

Some webmasters might look at this list of domains as a lot of work. It is, and so is domaining. But for the professional domain name investor willing to properly put the time in, page rank and traffic can increase. The statistics of this increase in SEO value will be available for any potential buyer to review through various analytics or domain value estimators.  And then domainers can cultivate buyers using qualified data that gives new buyers inspiration to bid, with greater success and enhanced networking response.

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In working inside the domain world, people become independent business men (and women) without even knowing it. Internet individuals of every age and rank, teenagers, men and women acquire domain names and offer them for sale constantly, yet they seem to maintain a sort of naivete about the fact that what they are really doing is functioning as their own carnival barker-cum-insurance- salesman. This carries risks which the domainer (possibly unknowingly) is assuming.

Brokering your own domain name sale can have its challenges.  Escrow services have popped up online and established a benchmark many domainer trusts. These domain name escrow service companies work to form a break against the tide of aggression happening with entrepreneurs trying to vend their names to people who may not even speak their language but understand the value of the domain on offer or up for auction.

In observing a heated discussion today between two bidding domainers in a private auction, I realized the lava was being generated by the fact that the seller’s decision to vend the name had not been covered by a reliable domain name broker service. Somewhere in the bid process, confusion had arisen as to how the domain sale would actually be executed. Suddenly, the history of each bid and the goodwill of both bidders was attached to a wild insistence to doing things “their way”.

This angst could have been avoided by stating as Terms of Sale a named broker service acting as name agent. Otherwise, the tension of a bid/offer scenario is reduced to a clammy sandwich of broken promises, dying away email communications, and eroding forum threads, which might have formed the basis of a profitable domain sale. The world is full of domainers who have been caught up in the bonfire of anxiety, exhilaration, excitement and pure greed a bidding frenzy whips up.

Both bidders wanted to use their own version of a buyer’s contract, which of course didn’t meet with the approval of the seller. The actual excitement of the name and who would win it was mired down in discussions of “Tastes Great/ Less Filling” variety vis a vis online business contracts. The seller was suddenly caught in the crossfire of dissenting opinions due to his own lack of foresight in covering his bases.

How did the sale pan out? It didn’t.

As the discussion wound down so did the eagerness of both domainers to get the name. The seller had lost a good opportunity and squandered the good faith of both customers. The deer in the headlights was the seller, whose paying customers had moved on to greener pastures. The domain name was the unfortunate roadkill meeting its ugly demise by the side of information superhighway.

All this pain and suffering could have been avoided if the seller had just involved a listing and brokering service that would have wrapped up every question in  neat set of FAQs. When domains are at issue, good faith and the Internet part company when dollars cross the international dateline. Always cover your bets where a domain registration or name sale is concerned. Always respect the rights of the other (domaining) party in the the transaction. Translated: Nobody “has” to do anything.

Ethical domainers do business this way. (Hint: Don’t look to PayPal to police your four-figure domain sales. ) The benefit of a growing “rap sheet” of successful domain sales at any escrow service is the enlistment of those same escrow services on your behalf in times of trouble. Your good behavior will serve you in good stead when some upstart tries to steal your domain or hijack your site. “Free rent” is a negligible concept where hosting and bandwidth costs are concerned.

Yes, escrow services charge a fee. But so do most non-banking institution ATMs and that hasn’t stopped people from using them. A slice of the action is a small price to pay for delivery of the big bid. If you’ve got online real estate, trust the professionals to turn over the big amounts and rest easy that all is copacetic. Escrow services for domain names transfer the worry of a big dollar domain sale to the heavy hitters who pave the way for a legitimate and legal domain name sale payday.

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Domaining an app is the hottest web development move out there. A happening domain needs Tube support. Youtube.content can be developed and produced using simple tools online. The video media format can be packaged by a multitude of resident system applications, freeware obtainable online, and custom retail video editing software.

Domainers can try their hand at helming projects which a wide variety of users will see. Endorsement of the material can lead to word of mouth and end user referrals. New apps are churning out like wildfire right now for new devices like the Ipad and portable handheld and gaming sites too. Video slices or “tubes” can be embedded easily with tags and captions to create an interactive site that gives visitors something to do.

Domains can hold whatever custom content their webmasters decide upon. these can be coaching tutorials, screenshot by screenshot demonstrations, videos, narrated audio slide shows and other media. The affiliate offers can be blended into demonstrational material that encourage visitors to click on ads. Domain keywords can be emphasized with video images and image tags reflecting actual content.

A website authored by a domain holder can be optimized for site SEO and traffic statistics. The content can be tagged as a how-to video and also as educational, occupational, and promotional. This type of material is readily discoverable and very searchable. The ease with which these types of videos can be made and uploaded is a result of the viral video phenomenon sponsored by YouTube’s popularity. Desktop microphones make any webmaster a narrator.

The domainer who promotes their website using coaching video, how-to methods, tips and tricks, shortcut techniques and screenshot demonstrations has many advantages. The webmaster can decide what words and narrative text and captions get featured, presumably keyword-rich and SEO optimized. The domainer can set up complementary sites and link them together.

A site plan which concentrates a density of words and themes in the content around the site domain keywords will be successful in aggregating visitor traffic. Referrals to the coaching material will also get linked to from forums, online bulletin boards, and member communities of the subject topics. The site plan can outline the key steps in each “lesson” and provide yet another spoke in the SEO discoverability wheel.

Beginners making videos and slideshow media can sketch their plan using Powerpoint outline view notes or slides printed out for jotting down ideas. Screenshots can be defined into surgical coaching material by making highlighted areas using Paint and the selection tool with the colored outline box delineating the referred-to area.

Webmasters should provide how-to content by asking and answering questions about the process or technique involved. What kinds of people will be viewing this presentation? What kinds of language and images will they respond to? What general references and specific details will they expect to see? What kinds of action need to be demonstrated, and how does this fall in with the overall site goal?

Uploading video concoctions to YouTube assist in server hosting costs and allows the domainers to build a site channel that refers YouTube surfers back to the target web site. One key draw for site visitation is to allow continued searchability of the video at YouTube and then cover the video space with a link to the destination website. This brings fulfillment oriented site visitors.

But by hosting exclusive video,  a webmaster can originate valuable content. By authoring original programming they turn their domain name into a brand and their website becomes an advertising portal that turns into a channel. And video channels quickly become very sticky websites with a ton of buzz, just the thing a domainer likes.

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For domainers looking to pick up a few great domain deals here is a typical analysis of the Pool hotlist and the drop evaluation technique. The Pool list is published via email from Pool.com daily in anticipation of recipient interest in bidding on names at the Pool.com domain name auctions held daily online. These names drop or are put up for sale by domainer sellers daily.

Deletion lists can be addicting because they show what other domainers have been up to. Drop lists show what domain names other domainers have decided are either not worth their while to renew, or what domains they have not gotten around to renewing. As many a domain name fish story will start, the “renewal email got lost in the shuffle’ incidence can happen very easily indeed.

Unless a domainer already has a site invested for a given trademark, trademark names are best avoided. One reason they are in the drop to begin with is that the owner has either gotten a “Cease and Desist” letter from the copyright owner or fears one will arrive with any further development of the name. Trademark names are a risk. The domain Amazondiscounts.net is an example of a possible trademark name.

Short names are always good to review because they may come very close to names you already own or may be acronyms for longer names you already own. This begets “type-in” traffic domainers want. A name in tomorrow’s Pool list, like r0b.net, could be good for domain name owners and administrators named Rob or those with burglary aspirations, or those with acronyms totaling R-O-B.

A name for sale like cashmonk.com might be a very good site name for an affiliate or cash raising site or a website with strategems for building multi level marketing or popup revenues online. Keywords like “cash” and “money” can be competitive bidding arenas, so domainers should have their checkbooks ready for active bidding. Money words are genuine traffic attractors because so many people are looking for information about money markets, investing, budgets and so forth online all the time.

Hyphenates are an acquired taste. Some domainers stem from the “old school” of domaining where almost any hyphenate was a detractor for original name value. Symbols were estimated as harder for web users to remember, type in, or use. Hyphenates always stand the risk of building type-in traffic for the name owner of the same domain name without the hyphen.

A name like debt-elimination.com has “money” name appeal but a hyphenate detractor element to it. A domain name for sale at Pool.com like rugged-notebooks has a tech designation but a hyphenate detractor dynamic as well. Likely buyers for this name should be those with other names with “notebook” in them for traffic continuation or site keyword mirroring and linking.

A deleting name like foreclosedlists.com reflects conflicting factors within a qualified domain name up for auction. This is a real estate name, and a partial money name, but also a list name, and can be considered too long by some purist domain name investors. But the likelihood of searches for this type of site might be estimated to be high enough to realize value and profit for affiliate and traffic visits.

Prohomes.com follows much of the same logic, except it can be argued to more valuable because it is much shorter to type in than foreclosedlists.com. The homes market for domain names may also be seen as a longer term viable keyword investment than the “foreclosure” arena of recent financially related real estate activity. Prohomes.com could be an excellent long term domain “flipping” investment waiting for the right corporate buyer.

Foodcult.com and fakeplants.com make amusing ideas for websites if the bidding price can be kept within the probable window of return on domain investment. The domainer should have an idea what assembling a directory and a number of articles should cost and a link building strategy for the site.

Further on down the list, On99.com might make a good site if the number 99 has some relevance to another data item or price level, such as 99 cents or 99 dollars. Numerical domains can be tricky, but a good example of a site is gymnastics2010.com, which has up to the minute gymnastics articles for this current year. Date domains can be worthwhile to acquire and develop in their current “date year”.

Download the full Pool.com list is available at the pool website, and searching out special domain names or names not featured on the list is a domainer’s stock in trade. Expect higher bidding for short names, and money names, and manage bids so cascading auctions don’t rob the domainer of time to rebid. Finally, resist the urge to get in a bidding war or rally to a name that builds interest simply as an auction win to acquire.

Safe and happy drop listing, everyone!

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Skimming the drop lists is one of the first ways a newb domainer can teach themselves the ropes. Drop lists are available for free and can be perused using whatever script or program seeking search the domainer can devise. Drop lists and deletions lists come from expiring domains whose owners have elected not to renew them.

Drop names also come from registrars who have elected not to retain the names any longer. Registrars have the right to retain the name for new registration after it has passed its last pending renewal period. But some registrars may not want to include the name in its database. The load on the servers may already be too taxing. Or the registrar may simply only want to support paid active registered names.

The domainers’  task is to ferret out which marketable names occur on the drop list and which they might bid on and get at a reasonable price. Some names may seem like they would be very competitive, but for that day the other bidders might be overcommitted or doing something else. Marking out which names you want to bid on and which values you want to assign your highest big sharpens the domaining instinct.

The competitive bidding inside the drop lists day by day is a sport of domainer kings. Keeping abreast of the list for chosen keywords or subject names or even niche terms can pay off with great picks. but the raw data can be too much for some domainers to handle daily. So the drop lists can be downloaded in five day advances for the next five rolling days of drop name auctions.

Many domainers specialize in drop scanning and bird dogging for bargain names in the deletions bin. They develop customers who want certain niche names like typos or sports names, adult names or short names. These domain name buyers create another layer in the domain name game.

User names in auctions become familiar, especially among drop list customers. A history of other bidders can also be seen in some cases. That way domainers know what kind of heavy hitters they are bidding against. Or they can assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of another domainer bidder and decide on their bidding strategy for a certain domain name based on those things.

Identifying keyword terms to your choice is a good idea before scanning the drop lists. Choosing certain names or words that you want to build up into a concentration inside your domain name portfolio can also make this task easier. If domainers are not careful, they will go on bidding and buying sprees for domain names without consolidating a strategic market plan first.

Continuing deletion auctions show names which have been auctioned up into a froth of new bidding wars from their “deceased” status. Often a domain owner will put their domain name into the drop lists to see which avid offers they can get. Or they simply have too many names to handle at present. One domainer’s drop can be another domainer’s mountain of gold.

Expiring names can also be accidental “drops” from the owners who are too busy to scan their expiration emails. They can also be packs of domain names very similar to each other being jettisoned in groups by weary former owners. Knowing what you are looking for in advance, or setting a ceiling on auction bids will save time and resources when bidding on drop list auctions.

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The criteria for assessing a domain name for purchase, resale, or development are fairly open to all.  The keyword value forms one value. Monetary resale is always a goal. Various sites online work to produce an estimation value, although few can claim to be conclusive. Auction sales for domains work well specifically for this reason. Domains can go to the highest bidder according to independent valuation.

While one community of domain name buyers and sellers may quote assorted values from estimation sites, those members are never committed to accept those values as indicative of any redeemable or legal citation. The general value of a domain name still remains the value for which it can, and is sold. Other domain values are as spurious as yesterday’s news.

Some domainers prize traffic statistics, and some domainers work from the original sale price.  Domain ratings systems can indicate the value of a domain, but cannot guarantee it will bring that price under the domain auction gavel. But an important component of many a domain names’ assessment is how the buyer or developer uses those metrics to go forward.

Typing a name into a category does not institute monetary value. Many keyword generics lie fallow in domain portfolios worldwide. The rationale for these to not be developed is that no development could renew the value the domainer has already invested and still reap the profit they have planned. These domainers are waiting for big-ticket auctions to vend their names.

Other names are still in the transitory period between acquisition and decision making. Maybe the domainer hasn’t had time to investigate the best of of “x” domain yet.  Or perhaps they are waiting for a spike in related content or keywords to vend the name in a private sale or escrow process. Parking is a time consuming challenge to manage and keep up to date with. And the lack of development attached to a parked name always make me leery of its traffic.

A topical forum post caught my attention debating this topic. Yahoo has a domain rating system which declaims a domain as:  Banned, Trademark,
Quality Control, Controversial, and Restricted are terms no domainer wants to see associated with their names. These names generally will little to no sale value. But one domainer’s name value authority can be another’s temporizing engine.

Where do the evaluation and assessment sites stand? Yahoo has a cloud over it (not a good one), and many domainers deride Alexa while still avidly utilizing it to assess their domain positoning ion te name marketplace. Valuate.com has many fans, and many banner ads. Estibot has some faithful fans, and assessment tools at Sedo, Pool, and Google Adsense can offer some additional metrics.

Since domainers are always looking to revalue and affirm their portfolio total, a trustworthy domain ratings site or evaluation destination tool is mush desired. A domainer cannot guarantee the originating site or evaluation engine for a domain name will still be in operation or still have the same integrity when the resale or auction decision is made.

Domainers need to avoid becoming emotional about their domain purchase choices. The most unsexy of domains can be the hardest workers, reaping affiliate revenues and growing traffic metrics while the big players spend a fortune promoting their varsity level urls. The traffic statistics going forward are what matter, and the business development the current domainer invests in the domain name is what cultivates domain value.

Domain names can be valued at one time ans the equally creditable estimation of that same domain name can be evaluated at another time and the value can be very different but extremely accurate. A domainer assumes risk when a big dollar domain purchase occurs and the lifetime of that value is not the same as the lifetime of the domain ownership. The joy of domaining is leveraged on what values the owner can bring to the name, and any other strategy sounds a lot like sour grapes.

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