Domain Owl

Have you gotten bogged down with everyday activities and missed a prime domain name deleting from your hosting or registrar account? Assigning an old email address, spam filtering, and the wearying upsell chain of emails from your hosting account and registrar can make even the savviest domainer skip any subject lines from those domain auto-generation lists.

Make a spreadsheet or get a small notebook. On each page (or in each column) write down the name of the domain you bought, the place you purchased it, how much, and the expiration date. If you have the Paypal address or the email contact and name of the person who sold it to you, this could be queried later on if there is a contested name change.

If you used an online forum, resales portal or auction house, get the user name and note whether or not the person exchanged proper trader rating data. Selling a domain name can be something that domain owners trumpet to the skies, especially if they made a profit. Following the purchase, Google the domain name to see if any comments (or protests) regarding the domain name sale have been published online.

The domain purchase price becomes the new start value for the domain. Every marketing cost or time investment must evaluated for change in domain value from here on in. Don’t use any other projected values discussed in the negotiation phase of acquiring the domain. Those are not concrete. Your goal is to change this domain name purchase value and increase it until the name can be marketed for resale.

Create  a page in the notebook or spreadsheet for domain traffic and SEO measurements. It is worthwhile to note online metrics generators searches for the name on such and such a date, and tabulate changes at these same generators for the name later on. If you jump around using sweetheart sites to get the values you want, the data validity won’t be as strong as all values over time.

As stated, the domain purchase price is the establishing value. This value can be inserted into a variety of formulas. These formulas can be used to generate reports for domain name auction or resale data later on. By establishing an origin data point for all your domain calculations from then on, you can make a quarterly growth table for all the values. These would be traffic, new user signups, offer inquiries, or ad responses and Google revenues.

The notebook domaining method can be used if you only have one or two domains and don’t feel a need to mechanize the data. But it gets easier as you buy more domains to just add the basic information and let legacy formulas through the sreadsheet take over the work for you. Also, exporting data be  comes easier to cut and paste into a computerized spreadsheet, especially if you are catching up.

Regarding domain name expirations; If you outline the Expiry date in red, or sort regularly once a week to check domain name expirations in the spreadsheet, you do a quick check for renewals due, So, when the panic strikes in the middle of the night your most valuable domain is slipping away through the droplist, you can flip pages or scan the top dates for calmness.

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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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