My previous article made fun of all the crazy “Nano” names that are purchased by people who are unclear on the concept. But today, I made what I think is an excellent nanotechnology name purchase. That is, NanoReport.com. I’ve been watching it for a while at SnapNames.com, waiting for it to delete so I could bid on it. I’ve picked up several names there for $60 without it going to auction, but I knew people would want this one an dit would enter the bidding stage.

I had a $62 bid on it for a while, but it jumped up past that this morning. So, I waited until the last couple minutes to grab it at $176. Some might say that’s high, but if they do they really don’t understand the field of nanotechnology. It’s affecting, or will be affecting, almost everything we manufacture. The domain name is perfect for either a free news site, or an expensive industry or investor newsletter.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, inernet, nano, nanotechnology, snapnames

What is it with domain buyers and the word “nano?” Talk about people unclear on the concept! Nanotechnology is simply the science of developing materials at the atomic and molecular level in order to imbue them with special electrical and chemical properties. With nanotechnology, we will have new and improved products in nearly every area. But, we aren’t going to be looking for “nano” items; we’ll still just look for the items in regular terms.

For example, nanotechnology is helping clothing manufacturers make wrinkle-free pants. But, you’re still going to shop for “wrinkle-free pants”, or just “pants” when they are eventually all wrinkle-free. I can just see someone walking into their favorite clothing store and asking, “Can you show me your nanopants?”

Aside from the science of nanotechnology, the shortened word “nano” is also being used as an adjective in describing something as very small, just as we have used the terms “micro” and “mini.”

Understanding this, let’s take a look at some of the names I pulled out of a deleted domains list last week. Mind you, this was a list of names deleting only on that day and only from GoDaddy.com (on TDNAM.com). And, I looked only at names beginning with “nano” in the .com suffix. I got 99 of them! Chances are one poor sucker bought most of these all by himself since they were all expiring on the same day from the same registrar. It just goes to show you people will register just about anything if there is a trendy word involved. Following are just a sampling of the names.

Nanoauctioneer.com: Either a very, very small person performing an auction, or an auction for buyers of nanos.

NanoCarnival.com: I’ve seen carnivals with the “little people” in shows, but is this for carnivals dedicated to that?

NanoAutoParts.com: I hope the nonowrenches come with them.

Nanochef.com: I like to get a little more on the plate.

Nanoclippers.com: For petite toes?

Nanocranium.com: Describing his own brain for registering this?

Nanocuffs.com: Ouch! Too tight, too kinky.

NanoDriveway.com: Is this to go with the new fuel-efficient, smaller cars?

NanoHotTub.com: Okay….

NanoInfant.com: Now that’s a tiny toddler.

NanoJoker.com: HaHa, that’s funny. Not.

NanoNinja.com: “Didn’t see him coming…”

NanoMassage.com: Oohhh, that felt…like nothing.

NanoMusical.com: Let the little voices be heard!

NanoWine.com: Just gets you a little tipsy.

NanoVacations.com: There is nothing like a weekend escape to the nano factory.

NanoWrinkles.com: I wish they were nano-sized.

Following is the complete list I found that day.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, nano, nanotechnology, GoDaddy, expired domain

(Read on …)

How do you get traffic to domain names you have in inventory? Some get traffic naturally, based upon misspellings, popular word names, and previous site traffic. Sure, you can also get some traffic from search engines sending visitors to your parked domains as well. But, what if you have a brand-spanking new domain name that isn’t a misspelling and isn’t a simple popular word or phrase, and you want much more traffic?

The obvious advice is that you must build a web site for the domain name. But, that’s a lot of work, unless you are real web whiz and just love to spending time building sites rather than looking for more domain names. If only there was a way to whip up a real web site that has new content daily–without much work at all.

I’ve done just that. I spent the last week off and on (I’m a slow web designer) creating a very simple site that shows the latest news in the area of alternative energy, an area in which I own many names. Now that I have it set up, I don’t need to do anything at all. It updates itself with new news automatically!

And it’s not complex. Basically, I use one of the many RSS news aggregators (I use Carp) to grab the news feeds I’ve set up to request, filtered for the appropriate content, and display them on the page. There was a learning curve to incorporate the aggregator, but it wasn’t too bad given I have some technical expertise. In addition, to keep it simple, and to keep server resources down, it doesn’t use SQL.

You can see my first try at it at AltEnergyToday.com. I know it needs some “beautifying” and I’ll get to that shortly. I do have the Adsense ads up already and a quick and dirty pointer to the list of my Alternative Energy domain names on this site.

The real beauty of this site is that I can replicate it in an hour for any other subject matter. For example, I have a large number of domains in the Robotics area. Once I get the template how I really like it, I’m going to make a similar site for Robotics at a domain I just bought called RoboticsReport.com.

What’s all this cost? Nothing. While I paid for the commercial version of Carp, there is a free version that would have done the same thing (I didn’t end up using the premium features). As for hosting the site, I simply use an “Add-on” domains which are free at my favorite web hosting company, LivingDot.com (the absolute, without question, fastest support on the net today).

Now, I’ll just wait and see if the site gets popular and generates some Adsense revenue and visitors to Domain Rookie to see my domains. And then there is always the added benefit of increasing the value of my AltEnergyToday.com domain.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, web site, internet, alternative energy, solar, solar energy, fuel cell, wind energy

I have all my names listed and parked on Afternic.com. With their Afternic Choice program, you can choose from their own house parking and two other leading parking services, Domain Sponsor and Fabulous. And, it’s not all or nothing–you can split up your portfolio among the three.

I had originally set all my names to the house parking option, which worked out well. But,after reading good reviews about the other two parking options, I thought I’d give Domain Sponsor a try. I used the global edit tool to make the quick change to the entire portfolio.

Over the next few days I periodically checked some of my names to see how well Domain Sponsor had optimized my pages. But, no optimization had occurred on any I checked, and the pages had irrelevant, generic links on them. Of course, no one was clicking any of them. In the meantime, I went to various forums, and contacted Afternic and Domain Sponsor, to figure out why the pages were not optimizing. The people on the forums weren’t quite sure. But, Domain Sponsor wrote back and told me that their “auto-optimization system takes about 7-10 days to reach full returns.”

I had since done a test with the partner Fabulous, and it had taken less than a day to optimize my pages. Seeing as I didn’t want to wait up to ten days to start getting clicks, I then switched all my names to Fabulous and within a day all was well.

Thinking about what Domain Sponsor had told me about it taking 7-10 days to “reach full returns,” I wondered if that was supposed to mean it would take that long for them to get to the page, or that long to complete an optimization process that began earlier. If it had begun on day 2, like Fabulous or house parking did, and then simply improved over the next 7-10 days, that would have been fine. But, my concern was that I had names with very clear keywords in them, like for example, “solar energy,” which were not getting optimized. A third word in the names was often rather generic, and so would not have thrown off the optimizer. After too many days of looking at my Solar Energy names providing terrible links, and after watching both Fabulous and House Parking show great links within 24 hours, I had to make the switch away from Domain Sponsor.

My understanding is that Domain Sponsor does provide excellent optimization, and I don’t really doubt that it would have been just fine after ten days. I just felt it would be informative for me to let readers know about the time lag so that if they really wanted Domain Sponsor as their parking partner, not to give up too soon. As for me, I just have little patience for long waits.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, parking, afternic, domain sponsor, fabulous

Speaking of misspellings (my last article), while reviewing a list of recently deleted names, I came across something interesting. Now, I know that domain investors purposefully buy domain names that are common misspellings of a popular, active domain name in the hopes that a significant minority of people misspell the domain name and wind up on their parked page. But, last week I saw an example of taking a good idea to way too far!

Within the list of deleted domains, I saw 78 misspelled variations of KOACampGround.com. Yes, that was 78. I think this “investor” must have obviously learned his or her lesson on that one, and just let them all expire. Geez, it not like he was doing misspellings of a popular domain name like Google.com or something. KOA Campgrounds? Come on!

Compounding the problems for our fellow domainer–and I can only assume these must be his too, since they expired on the same day–was his other, equally disastrous attempt. There were also 95 domains that were misspellings of FactoryDirectFurniture.com! How many people are actually keying in FactoryDirectFurniture.com with the correct spelling? LOL!

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, camping

I’ll admit it. I’ve misspelled three of my domain names when I purchased them, rendering them useless (I know some misspellings are good and taken on purpose, but not these.).

I don’t know about you, but my fingers are flying on the computer constantly, between a dozen open tabs in Firefox, Word, email and whatever else; not every word ends up spelled correctly. My mind is just too fast for my fat fingers. I’m used to not worrying about it, since I always run the spell checker on documents and email. I even have an extension for Firefox to check my spelling in web page input boxes.

But, the problem is that domain names are not something you are used to spellchecking and it’s easy to miss one when you are registering multiple names a day. It just seems so dumb that you might misspell a short domain name that you don’t even think about it. A quick look at it and it looks fine, right? Not always. Some combinations of letters are deceiving, or you just might be a lousy speller.

So, here’s what I try to do each time I’m ready to buy a name that my registrar says is available: Before jumping up and down and screaming to my wife, “hey honey, guess what name I’m going to buy! I can’t believe it’s available!” I’m going to spell check it. Now how do I spell check a domain name which is most likely not in the dictionary? I copy the word from the input field and paste it into a Word document (all the while making fun of myself for having to do this). Then, I remove the .suffix from it and place spaces between any of the words that are a part of the domain. For example, if the name is iamacrappyspeller.com, I will make it look like “I am a crappy speller”. Then I spell check it.

Of course, if you have a name with character strings that are not words, you can’t expect those portions to spell check.

A similar problem arises when buying a name from an auction. Some words look perfectly normal, but you might not realize that 1) they are misspelled, or 2) one of the letters is a look-alike character. For example, “vv” often looks like “w” and a “1” looks like an “l”. There are others as well.

So, what I do is highlight and copy the word into a Word document, and then check the spelling. If it does not contain all dictionary words, I enlarge it greatly to see if the characters are what I thought. I was almost fooled more than once.

Oh, and while you are at it, while furiously bidding away in the final minutes of an auction, take a few extra seconds to slow down when keying the numbers of your bid, and read it back to yourself out loud before pressing OK. An extra zero can make what was supposed to be a $50 bid $450 more painful.

Does anyone have any horror stories they’d like to share?

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, auction

If you look at the rightmost sidebar column, you’ll see a new section called “News Feeds.” Under it there are, at the time of this writing, a Google Feed and a Yahoo Feed. When you click on either one, you’ll see a display of the latest news articles from the source that contain keyword “domain name,” effectively giving you a domain name news feed. Of course, these come from general news sources, so you’ll just get stories that are big enough to interest the mainstream news media. But, nonetheless, there are some interesting items that come up.

I wish to expand this section with additional feeds, particularly from blogs that comment on the domain name industry. If you know of any that I would be interested in, please enter a comment below with the site or feed URL and I’ll take a look at it.

P.S. That last article on hilarious domain names sure kicked butt! I’ve been getting thousands of visitors a day; one day 10,000! Not bad for a new little blog.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain names, icann, feed, newsfeed, rss

Welcome to all who have been sent here to this specific, extemely popular page by all the other sites that are linking to it! Before you leave, make sure to my home page and take a look at the rest of the articles.

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What do you check before you buy a domain name. Spelling of course. Trademarks. What else?

Sometimes a domain name phrase is intended to be pronounced in one way, but if you look at it differently, it can be pronounced in a another, often hilarious, way. The classic example that is often mentioned on the internet is a site called Experts Exchange, where techies gather to answer each others’ questions. The founder of the site picked out what seemed like the very nice domain name of ExpertsExchange.com, and it became very popular. But, early on, he found out that some were reading the the domain name differently, mispronuncing it as ExpertSexChange.com. LOL! He’s since changed his site name to Experts-Exchange.com to make sure everyone understands he is not in the business of performing sex change operations. I was surprised to see that he did not hang on to the original domain though, pointing it to their new domain name. It now sits parked for click revenue.

There are other classic mispronounced domain names. One is the site WhoRepresents.com, with the unfortunate alternate enunciation of WhorePresents.com. But, since it’s in the performing artist arena, maybe it’s not just a misnomer. Another is TherapistFinder.com, for those looking for California marriage and family therapists. Unfortunately, the wrong clientele might stumble upon the site as TheRapistFinder.com. And then there is PenIsland.net, where you can buy custom pens. However, someone could mistake their site name for something else if they pronounce it PenisLand.net. Adding to the hilarity–and maybe it’s just me and my sick mind–is this quote: “Whether you’re looking for a long and skinny pen, a thick pen, a fountain pen that squirts ink, or even a black pen, we have just the one for you.” Is it just me? I’m on the floor laughing my ass off! They had to have written that fully knowing what they were saying.

If after reading all this, and I’ve offended you because you are, in fact, a candidate for a sex change if you only had the money, I apologize and I’ve got good news for you. You can head over to DollarSexChange.com. Oh sorry, that was DollarsExchange.com.

Here are some other active sites with interesting names:

ChooseSpain.com is also ChoosesPain.com

GraphicArtsExchange.com is also GraphicArtSexChange.com

GoTahoe.com is also GotAHoe.com. Not sure if “hoe” is an alternate spelling for “ho,” but Yahoo Images thinks so.

ScaTissue.com is also ScatIssue.com. At least they sell napkins there in case you come across some scat.

I used Whois.sc’s Domain Explorer function to find all registered names that ended in “sexechange.com”. There were dozens that were obviously meant to have meanings other sex change. But, the owners must have figured out the problems with them because about all are not in use. These are names like:

• Comics Exchange.com (ComicSexChange.com)
• VeteransExchange.com (VeteranSexChange.com)
• MusiciansExchange.com (MusicianSexChange.com)
• ActorsExchange.com (ActorSexChange.com)
• ExoticsExchange.com (ExoticSexChange.com)
• GraphicsExchange.com (GraphicSexChange.com)
• HomesExchange.com (HomeSexChange.com)
• KidsExchange.com (KidSexChange.com)
• MomsExchange.com (MomSexChange.com)
• PlayersExchange (PlayerSexChange.com)
• WomensExchange.com (WomenSexChange.com)
• StudentsExchange.com (StudentSexChange.com)

I understand names with dashes in them are less valuable than those without. While I’ve heard that search engines will possibly index a name with a dash separating multiple keywords better than the same name without dashes, the issue of verbally saying a name with dashes in it is too cumbersome. And , even after it’s said, its too easy for the user to forget to key in the dashes.

But, in case such as those I’ve listed here, I it would be wise to pick up two versions of a name, one without the dashes and one with. You could host the domain name with the dashes, and have the one without the dashes redirect to that site. This way, you could advertise your site with the dash in it, for easy recognition of the site’s purpose. Those who forget the dash when keying in the name will be sent the site.

I’d like to hear of more mispronounced domain names. If you know any, please post them here in a comment.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, humor, internet, spelling

I’ve created the “Resources” page where I am listing useful web sites and tools for domain investors. Please go to the page and let me know what other sites and categories I should be including there. You can contact me via my email contact form, or post a comment here.

Go to the Resources page here.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, internet, resources