How one domain investor cracked the brandable domain code

Michael Bang has figured out how to find domains with a good chance of being accepted on Atom. He wants to help other domain investors, too.

A lot of rookie domain name investors make mistakes when they choose which domains to register.

Michael Bang admits he’s made plenty of mistakes.

But using Atom as a guide, he thinks he has figured out how to register better domains, at least measuring by which domains are accepted as premiums by Atom.

It’s important to caveat this up front: so far, Michael hasn’t sold any of the hand-registered domains he has listed on Atom. It’s only been a few weeks since they went live.

At the same time, I think Michael has been able to greatly improve the domains he’s registering by running them through a process that’s much better than just gut feel, especially for someone relatively new to the business.

Michael told me he previously submitted 100 names to BrandBucket and only 8 were approved. He hadn’t had much more luck with Atom, either.

But that changed about a month ago. He found a method of hand-registering domains with an 80% approval rate (so far) for Atom’s Premium marketplace.

“When I started investing in domains, the biggest hurdle was figuring out which domain names had a good chance of being approved as premium names,” he told me via email. “Even though I’ve listened to numerous podcast episodes and read as many articles on brandable domains, there was never a real recipe.”

So what’s his recipe?

1. Find keywords – Michael looks at some of the most expensive two-word domains on Atom and BrandBucket. He uses this as a guide for keywords that are popular.

2. Add the keywords to a spreadsheet in the second column

3. Put another keyword/prefix into column A, and use the concatenate function to combine them with his keyword list to create a list of domains

4. See which domains are available

OK, so far that’s not rocket science. Lots of people keep a keyword list. I think it’s smart that he looked at keywords in high-priced domains on brandable marketplaces, though. I don’t think many people do that.

It’s the next steps that I think many domain investors would benefit from following.

5. Check how the two words in the available domains are used on Atom and Brandbucket. Does the domain make sense compared to existing combinations?

6. If yes, then check the appraisal at Brandpa.com. He uses a $995 threshold.

7. Finally, run the domain through Atom’s Domain Insight Tool and make sure the score is 7 or higher.

Michael thinks 7 is the magic number to get the domain accepted. But he said AI isn’t perfect, so it makes sense to scrutinize domains with lower scores.

Interestingly, Michael doesn’t immediately add the domain as a Premium on Atom. He elects to list it on the standard marketplace until Atom itself suggests that it might be a good domain to upgrade to Premium.

If all of this seems like a lot of work, stay tuned. Michael is working on some automation tools. One will replace adding terms to a spreadsheet. (His solution sounds a lot like Lean Domain Search, but without auto-checking if the domains are available.)

The other will predict the likelihood of the domain being accepted as a premium domain on Atom.

Michael would like your help. To improve his tool to predict approval on Atom, he needs to get examples of domains that were rejected. He asks that people filter their Standard listings for “Rejected (Premium)” and export the list. You can email it to him at info @ michaelbang.com. Michael said the names will only be used for machine learning, and the data will be deleted immediately after use.