7 Golden Rules for Investing in Domains

1. Quality over Quantity

Domains are cheap so if you want to, you can hand register over 1,000 domains for less than $10,000. Would that make you happy? Would you consider yourself a “big shot domainer” if you were to own 1,000 domains? Wake up!

Most of the people who are just starting out as domain name investors make the mistake of hand registering worthless domains. For example, lots of people thought they would make it big by hand registering as many five letter domains as they could afford. Needless to say, practically all of them ended up learning a fairly expensive lesson. If you want to invest $10,000, buy a handful of domains which are actually worth it for 2 simple reasons:

a) A domain with inherent value will always be in demand

b) If you own about 1,000 domains, you’ll end up having to pay around $10,000 yearly in registration fees. If you own 10, you’ll only have to pay roughly 100 bucks per year in order to keep them all.

2. Stay Away from Over-Hyped Extensions

Do a bit of research and you’ll understand why. Dot mobi domains are one of the best examples: people have initially paid a lot of money for them but as time went by, these domains started losing more and more value for one reason: the fundamentals just aren’t there, dot mobi is an extension which has been over-hyped and nothing more.

The rule of thumb? .com is king.

10 Unusual Domain Name Search Tools to Find Hot Domains

1. NXdom

NXdom has indexed millions of DNS records of expired and unused domain names. You can search by prefix and suffix, and sort the results by length, readability, and popularity. The advanced options help you refine the results by giving you five more criteria to filter the results.

2. Nameboy

Nameboy is a popular domain name search tool that bases its results on a primary word and a secondary word. Nameboy says that its intelligent engine creates name variations from the sound and meaning of the keyword. The feature that I like is that it immediately color codes the results depending on the availability status of the domain name.

3. Namestation

Namestation comes with a slick interface. With just a few clicks you can enter your suggested keywords and combine them with prefixes and suffixes. Set a minimum and maximum word length and get your domain name results. The application also lets you combine keywords with hundreds of categorized wordlists for a search engine friendly domain name.