domain investing
Investing in domain names
Some days ago we were talking about how to start your online business finding a market for your websites, both to make money with a website or just to invest. Today we come with another related topic: Investing in domain names.
Yes, it may sound strange, investing in a domain name? Yes, you are right. During the past years some people saw the boom coming and registered the best available domain names and kept them for further resale. How did it end? Well, we have now the millonaires of the dot com era.
With this I’m not saying you will become millionaire investing in domain names. Well, in fact, domain investing it’s a hard business but also domain names are now a new investing field for ambitious modern investors. Many invested in stocks or homes in the past, now there is the option of domain names, it’s quite similar, but less known. Doing a bit of research you will find a lot of specific sites that talk about domain investment and where you can find some valuable tools and information to start your domain investment business.
Actually most of the big names are taken… How I can start then?
Well, there are two things you can do. Buy good names from private portfolios (it’s the expensive option) or catching expiring domain names (the cheapest but hardest way).
Buying private portfolio domains
To start creating your domain portfolio you need to set-up a budget, decide a niche (it’s recommended to mainly invest in one or two categories), and buy some names that you believe may be they may increase its value during the following months or years. Where to find these names? Well, you may check some domain selling sites (as Sedo.com or NameDrive.com) or perform a search for the terms “Domain portfolio” or “Buy domain names” in google. You will find plenty of sites with plenty of domains for sale.
Now it’s a good time to invest in these sort of volatile goods since people is more skeptic about them these days, because of the current economy status, but they will grow up in value in a few months or years. However, before start buying try to find out which sort of domains are valuable, it will save you money.
Invest in expiring domain names
Domain names are registered in a year by year basis. If people doesn’t renew their domain it expires and becomes available for public registration. This scenario is called domain drop.
There are many situations where a domain can end up expiring, including that the domain owner forgets about the renewal and let a valuable domain go. Many valuable domains expire every day (between 30,000 and 60,000 names daily) and doing a good research you can find real gold mine domains there.
To fight the “domain drop” and catch some good domain names to invest in them you need to contract a domain drop catcher. These “catchers” own powerful robots that will fight to register the domains you want for a small amount that starts at about 16$ (and up to hundreds of US$). There are many robots over there, as SnapNames or Pool (which are known to be the best but more expensive) but there are also some small domain catchers over there that are cheaper and give decent results. One of these domain backorders site is Name Captor, which charges 15.99 $ per operation and gives good results.
I encourage you to get some information about this quite new form of investing that’s becoming more and more popular every day. On the following days I’ll try to extend the information about this topic here at Blog Finances. Stay tuned!
Starting your online business
Today we come with an article related to the new and unknown e-business/e-investing opportunities. To open this section, I’ll post a brief introduction in finding a suitable market for investing or developing our business.
How To Find A Profitable Online Market to Invest
One of the mistakes that most unexperienced online businessmen commit is launching a product or a website without determining a concrete market or niche. Why do you need to do this? Because the product might not respond to a certain demand. With no demand, no one would buy, and this situation is condemned to the disaster.
So, the point #1 is finding a good or a suitable market for our products or investments.
This subject may seem intimidating but it’s quite easy to determine when an online market may be suitable for us or not, if there is a demand or not. You only need an idea, and this idea can come to your mind whenever you don’t expect… for instance while reading a book. Or while reading the newspaper. Or while playing darts with your buddies. You just need to be prepared for it.
It is always advisable to carry a small notebook with you, so that whenever these ideas come to your mind you can write them down to not forget them. Once you have an idea the next point is to determine if this idea may be right to build a business for?
Figuring this out is easy enough. Surely, an idea would entail thoughts of various possibilities you do with the same. An idea about cats can make you think of a cat breeding service, for instance. Or an idea about domain names, may move you to an eBook delivery site.
Now you have your brilliant idea, you need to determine its demand. You may use the tools found at: inventory.overture.com or nichebot.com
Enter your idea in the search box and you will be presented with words, phrases and numbers related to the subject you are looking for, from where you need to extract if your project may be profitable or not. The number of searches performed for a particular keyword or phrase is a good indicative of the demand for this sort of products.
You may want a key or phrase that’s wide searched… Well, this shouldn’t be the case. Demand is just half the battle. You also should know how the competition is going to be. You can give a look at this searching in, for instance google, for the given key or phrase and check the number of results it returns. If the searches for that key are more than the results in google you have found a niche. And a niche means a good oportunity.
Once a niche is selected, focus on it. If you’re not familiar with the topic, you just need to do some research. Build a website, buy a related domain name (even diverse variations if you plan to invest on this niche) to provide accurate info about the subject. And finally employ some marketing strategies to give it the exposure it needs.
Soon we will come back with more e-investing opportunities. Next day, investing in domain names. Stay tuned!