Your New Profitable Hobby

You know what you need? You need to try something new. You need to have something that’s fun and easy to do on the side.

Sports card collecting? Nah, too expensive and almost zero return on your money.

Knitting? Not too exciting.

How about something where your creativity can make your hobby more valuable? How about something where one right move can turn into thousands of dollars in an instant?

Do you know what your new hobby is?

Domain names.

Domain names are the names of the sites you go to. For example, you are reading Qwickly.com. Qwickly is the domain name and .com is the extension.

Domain names are considered intellectual property and can become quite valuable if your name is a very good one or desired by an online business or company. For example, the name Diamond.com recently sold for $7,500,000! Diamond.com is what people in the industry refer to as a premium domain. It is one word, .com, and a highly relevant, generic term to its field.

There are no diamond.coms left, but that doesn’t mean that new names that haven’t been grabbed yet won’t be highly sought after in the future. Take Google.com. Who would have thought the name would become the standard it is today. The domain Google.com is probably worth $100,000,000 minimum. Obviously, there is a lot behind the name, but this goes to show you the amount of potential any name can have.

When buying domain names, you should consider several factors.

1) What is the extension of the name? .com is the industry leader, but there are several extensions to choose from like .net, .org, and .info to name a few. Also, there are newly approved extensions such as .mobi and .name that are still a little uncertain in terms of their value in the domain industry. However, these extension fields are also more wide open in terms of what is available.

2) Trademark status. Be careful which domains you get. If you see Google.org available, don’t start celebrating. Google is a trademarked name and if you try to sell it, use it, or make money off it, there’s a good chance they will come after you. Your best course of action will be handing it over to Google as a Christmas present.

3) Domain registrar. There are tons of places to buy domains from, and prices vary a lot from place to place. You must be very, very careful about your choice of registrar. Some places are difficult to transfer domains from. Transfers come into play if you sell your domain to a buyer or want to develop the name into a website. Other registrars, like sites that also host your website, will sell you a domain for cheap - free or a $1.95 charge - but if you ever want to take the domain elsewhere, they will claim ownership and you will not be able to switch the owner or hosting site. This is just the tip of the iceberg, so be selective where you registrer your name at.

4) What the actual name is. If you are buying a name to sell, remember someone has to want it before they buy it. Scenario: You want to buy a domain to sell to people selling tennis balls. Clearly tennisballs.com or tennisball.com would be optimal names but they are gone. Don’t go out and register yellowtennisballz4u.com. That name isn’t worth the fee you paid to get it. It’s long. It has a z instead of the s. The 4 and the u are abbreviated and people won’t be sure which one to spell or not to spell out. It isn’t quick. It isn’t that memorable and it isn’t a good phrase. Finally, someone can’t just hear the name and type it in without elaborate explanation. Too many flaws.

An example of a better option would be tennisballstore.com. The name contains the key phrase “tennis ball.” It’s of medium length because of the key phrase, but not too long. The name is simple and easy to remember. Also, you won’t need to get the plural version of the name because no one would think to confuse tennisballstore.com with tennisballstores.com. The latter is too forced and awkward. However, you may want to register thetennisballstore.com just to cover your bases.

5) If you are considering developing an actual website, make sure the name fits your vision of the site. If you are creating a gaming site where people play free arcade games, be sure to pick a name that you feel comfortable with marketing. The default best option here is to describe the genre of site in the name. Freearcadegames.com would be a decent target name in terms of a domain with accurate description. However, you may want to come up with something off the wall - like Google did - if you can’t find anything you want available. A creative ploy Yahoo.com did was base their name off the acronym “You Always Have Other Options.” The possibilities are endless, but in the end you want an identity that will become synonymous of what your site is offering.

I started playing the domain name game a few months ago and I have become so emmersed in it that I now own 25+ domains and have my own domaining site. It’s a fun thing to do if you’re ever bored and it really isn’t too costly if you find the right sales or register at the right sites.

Among my favorite finds are neatprice.com, newproblem.com, and ebig.mobi.

Who knows what great finds are out there? Maybe you’ll get the next $10,000 name. If you’re interested or intrigued by domain names, please stop by my brand new forum-based site on domains: Domain49er.com. If you have any questions or want to know my appraisal on what a name is worth, let me know. Its free and I’d be happy to tell you about my favorite places to go.

Just go to Domain49er.com and click on forum. It’s a new, fresh community for all domainers - beginners and pros - to learn, discuss, appraise, sell, buy, and trade their domains.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 4:25 am and is filed under Reference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.