19 Jul 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 11 Comments

Four things that changed my approach to buying domain names

As I’ve told you, I love niches and hearing about how people found a cool niche. In addition, my youngest son will go away to college in two years.  So in order not to be totally lost when the youngest one goes away to school, I decided to create a couple of niche sites over the next couple of years that should have plenty of traffic and plenty of comments for me to deal with within that time.  I thought of a couple of niches and started searching for domain names about a week ago. I had always used GoDaddy’s interface for domain name search, because after a few of my trial and error searches, WhoIs would usually tell me I had exhausted the number of searches I could do. And as a beginner, all I would do would be to type in a domain name, and if GoDaddy said it wasn’t available I’d type in a second choice, then a third, a fourth, etc. Last week this beginner learned a few things:

1. People who own domain names are often willing to deal. I had found one good domain name – we’ll call it keyword.net, on GoDaddy’s auction, but the GoDaddy site wouldn’t even let me bid less than an $xxxx amount. So I went to the keyword.net site and found that I could request by email to get a price for the domain. I did that and was told the same $xxxx, so I emailed back to them, “No thanks, I don’t have that sort of money.” I really meant it, and you really do have to be ready to walk away, or else you may as well be ready to pay the full price. But the next day the rep emailed me again. “Would you like to make an offer, and I’ll see what my manager says?” Yes indeed. I offered $100. This was a keyword.net, after all. I got a response the next day – the rep’s “manager” had told him to make a counteroffer of $500. At that point I knew I could have the keyword.net for probably $250 or $300, but I asked the advice of a local guy who is pretty expert in creating high traffic websites, and also happens to be my friend. He advised me to stick to a .com, even if I have to have another little word on the domain name itself. So I got the keyword + life .com from BlueHost for free because they give me one free domain registration (or renewal) per year with my hosting plan. In other words, if I had been looking for blueeyed.net, I was able to get blueeyedlife.com very easily.

2. If the domain owner is not using privacy, it’s easy to see how many domains they own. Friday during lunch I thought of another keyword/niche I wanted, and I went to the site Thekeyword.com, which said it might be for sale by its owner! I had already checked out keyword.com and keyword.net and neither was even for sale. So I went to WhoIs and found the owner’s email address and emailed him. The next day I got an email from him saying that this was a premium domain and he wasn’t really thinking of selling it, but I could make a serious offer. What, me serious? I got curious and Googled his name and the domain name – and what did I find? I found a link to domaintools.com/thatdomainname.  That showed me some amazing things, such as, <The guy’s name here> owns about 9,579 other domains >. Other items such as the Alexa rank and trend, the SEO Score, and a lot more WhoIs information were there too.   (Saturday morning I learned more stuff you can find on domaintools.com in this post at TechJaws.com).  But to me seeing how many other domains this guy held told me he was not just an individual like me.  Not just a guy who bought a domain name and then decided he wanted to do something else. If you want to check this out, go to domaintools.com/anydomainnamehere. Like DomainTools.com/StevePavlina.com. You can see that “Pavlina LLC” owns about 5 other domains.  Yep – he isn’t going crazy on the domain names!

3.  You can rent/lease a domain name! I made an offer to the domain owner in 2. above, and not a real high offer at that.  After all, he had the word “The” before keyword, and I could always do that with another small word.   He returned my email and said I could rent/lease the domain name for that!  Gee, how would that work….I’d put in a couple of years of work on it, build traffic and backlinks…then he might say that was fun here’s your eviction notice?  Nope – I went ahead and bought keyword+zone.com (such as, nerdzone.com) from BlueHost for $10 and it’s all mine for a year.

4.  If you buy a domain name and then think of something better within a day or two, you may be able to get a refund or exchange. I’ve done it with GoDaddy and I did it with BlueHost recently.   I had always read in the past that once the domain registration goes through, it’s too late.   But both times I’ve asked, I’ve done it pretty quickly, and there was no problem at all in getting my money back so I could purchase the name I wanted.

All of the above are probably no news to the seasoned domain purchaser, but they were all new to me and definitely will change the way I approach domain names in the future.   If there’s a name you want, go ahead and investigate a little using DomainTools.com.  Maybe you’ll find someone like me who bought something then decided against it and now would just like to make their money back!