HotNameList.com and Domain Pigeon take different approaches to finding available domain names.
It’s still possible to hand register available domain names and make money. You just have to be smart about it. Here’s a look at two tools that can help.
The first is HotNameList.com. The owner of this site contacted me back in October. I responded that I didn’t think his site had anything new or unique. He added some features, including one based on my suggestion, and I now think the site is newsworthy.
HotNameList.com shows available domain names typically based on topical events. It scans for keywords in the news and finds related domain names. For example, a recent list included CatInsideBong.com, based on a story about a guy who was arrested for putting his cat in a bong. This is a comical example — most of the domains on HotNameList.com are better: BushMemos.com, FashionMishap.com, InterrogationTapes.com, and ToxicAsbestos.com. For each domain you can see the estimated number of monthly searches, estimated cost per click, and number of letters and words.
When I checked in on the site a couple weeks ago I noticed a number of the domains included trademarks. In response, the site set up a flagging feature that scans the domains against 2,500 trademarks. Most of the results are false positives, but it brings awareness to the cybersquatting issue, which is good for the domain industry.
Another domain finding site that takes a different tact is Domain Pigeon. It finds available domains and harnesses the wisdom of crowds to show which ones are more popular. The domains don’t seem to be topical and there are a lot of made up words that violate all principles of web site naming. But a quick review shows some good domains starting with ‘i’ and ‘e’ as wells as decent two word domain names.
Both sites make money by referring you to GoDaddy. If you find a good domain on these sites and use GoDaddy, you should support the sites by using their links.
Lincoln says
Thanks for the notice on these useful tools Andrew! Regged a few domains tonight.
Domain Offerings says
Andrew,
I would appreciate any feedback on how to make my domain offerings site more useful. I am toying with the idea of adding an estibot style keyword appraisal (but with correct msn, google and yahoo search counts) and the possibility of including google keyword tools counts in a downloaded windows executable version. Don’t really have the domaining experience to know if that effort would be worthwhile or what other types of tools might be needed that would be within my abilities to create. Thanks for any feedback and especially thanks for all the great articles you are posting here.