1. Niche - Decide on a niche to
concentrate on for the "session". Meaning for the time
you have set aside to look for domains focus on one subject
area. Hopefully an area you know a fair amount about.
For example we have been involved with IT certifications
before so we focused on IT
certifications for our niche to look for type-in domains.
a. Keep track of the
niche's you work on and the domains you go to find information
on them. It will be useful if you need it for
registering generic names or even for develop and why research
things twice.
2. Research possible
keywords we usually start by going to the main web sites for the
subject like certmag.com
and see what type of words people tend to use together when
describing a product, service, etc. . Also do
some searches on Google to get a feel for what keywords are
normally put together.
a. One easy thing to do is
go to a main web site of the industry and view the web page
by Source (IE go to View > Source) and look at the meta tags
(right after the title a meta tags) this gives you some
keywords to research.
b. Use other tools
like Acronym Finder,
for names try Names,
for the largest US cities try this
wikipedia list. Use your imagination and
experience. For more tools check out the
Resources.
3. Stats - Check to see how
much people actually do search with these words using tools
like Overture,
Google by running a search your looking for over a 1,000,000,
but sometimes can take less.
a. It doesn't hurt to keep
track of the overture results to speed up the research process
later, although the stats will hopefully may be updated later.
4. Bid Rates - Once you have some
terms check out tools to see how much advertisers are biding
on those keywords from your potential domain name. Try
Symbiotic,
Blogger.com, and check out other tools in
Resources.
a. A great name with
low searches and low keyword bids in Adsensee is not a good
candidate for parking, possibly for developing but not
parking.
b. Look for a
combination of solid searches something good in Overture
over 1,000 is great, solid search in Google over 1,000,000
is good, decent money on bid's say over $1, and most of all
use Common Sense see step 5.
5. Availability -
So now that you have
keywords time to start looking for names open up a registrar's
page and try to find one with bulk registration like GoDaddy.com which
allows you to search up to 500 names at once. Or if your
looking for country .TLD's or to see everything available with
the domain name I like
Network Solutions,
but it only allows you to search for 10 domains at a time. At this point
you just want to see if it's registered at all.
a. When checking for
availability of good domain names it's useful to utilize tools
that help you combine keywords into possible domain names.
These tools can be as simple as an excel spreadsheet using
concatenate command or programs like
NameBoy. For more
of these tools check out the
Resources section.
6. Common Sense -
Okay your happy so
far now use your common sense. Just because Michigan DWI
Lawyer pays a lot and is searched a lot does not mean
LawyerMichigandwi.com is a good name. In fact some
people will research names a session and then wait 3 days
prior to registering them to make sure they are not out of my
mind. Yes you'll lose some but you make up for it in the
money you save. Take a look at some of the horrible
domains that have been registered when people were starting
out -
Bad Domains.
6. Register - Finally your ready
to register your domain name. Check out the
Domain Registration
section and then the Domain
Parking to learn more about how to park a domain.
