The ValuableNames.com domain service is expensive but worth the price.
Yesterday I reviewed NameSpy, an expiring domain service that I don’t think is worth the $39.95 monthly fee. So you might be surprised that today I’m going to recommend a domain service that costs a whopping $699 a month!
ValuableNames helps you find great domain names that are currently registered but underused. The current owners of these domains might not understand the full value of the domains. For example, someone might have a good domain with lots of type-in traffic but they aren’t parking the domain. The big players in the domain industry know that while buying expiring domains is a good idea, to realize maximum value you have to buy domains before they expire. These players beat their competition to the punch, and ValuableNames can help you do this.
ValuableNames is a web-based subscription service. When you login to the service you are able to search for domains based on keywords. The system goes a step further by finding domains that use the keyword in a resolving domain’s HTML title tag. So if you search for “car”, you can optionally get related domains that don’t necessarily have “car” in the name (e.g. AutoParts.com).
You can apply multiple filters to your searches including:
-Incoming links
-Type-in traffic
-3 month type-in traffic
-Alexa rank
-Prefix Children (the number of domains that have the domain as the prefix – for example autoparts.com is a prefix of autopartsonline.com)
-DMOZ entries
-Search term lookups
-Pagerank
-Yahoo entries
-Whois status (e.g. Registrar-Lock)
After applying these main filters you can then apply site filters. You select what type of domains you want: ones with existing sites, those with PPC pages, inactive web sites (parked but not earning money for owner), and dead domains (not resolving). This is an extremely powerful set of filters, as my example below will show.
So what can you do with all of these filters? Let’s take an example. “Car” is a high paying keyword and traffic to car domains is worth lots of money. Let’s search for “Car”, apply a filter of at least 10 type-ins, and search only for inactive and dead domains.
97 domains are returned. Here are some examples and why they are valuable:
-BuyCar.com. ValuableNames shows that the Overture+Ext is 333 on average over the last three months. It also shows that the domain is at NetworkSolutions and is inactive (you’ll find that most uninformed domainers use Network Solutions). If you go to BuyCar.com you see an Under Construction page. The owner of this domain isn’t realizing the value from all of the type-in traffic the domain gets.
-NeedaCar.com. It averaged Ovt+Ext over the past 3 months and is dead. If you try to go to the domain it doesn’t resolve.
-MuscleCar.com. Ovt+Ext score of 607 on average the past 3 months. I resolves to a standard GoDaddy parking page, so the owner isn’t making money from it. It has an Alexa rank of 75,603.
Are you starting to get the idea? The owners of these domains are underutilizing their domains. Some owners realize the domains are good but don’t realize how much money they can make with them. Others don’t realize what they have and will let the domains expire. The idea is to find these domains and then e-mail the owners to ask them if they’re interested in selling.
After sending about 200 emails I’ve found a good number of them bounce because the Whois data isn’t accurate. But a good number of owners respond with either a price or request for offers.
ValuableNames isn’t for newbies. It’s for domain experts that routinely spend $1000s on domains. At $699 a month, you need to have a budget of $10k or so a month for domain purchases for the service to be worth it. (The service is limited to only 20 users). If you don’t have that kind of budget you can use a tool like Domain Research Tool. Domain Research Tool isn’t hosted so you have to run searches from your computer (and that creates some headaches). It also doesn’t have the same information offered by ValuableNames. I’m a fan of Domain Research Tool and it’s one time price tag of $249. But if you are a serious domainer — and make serious investments — check out ValuableNames!
[ValuableNames is offering one week trials for only $199 – a good way to see if the service is right for you.]
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