Top 100 Domaining Blogs

Also, if your domain name blog made it on to the list then don’t forget to grab the free widget to put on your site that will update in real time and let you show off your rankings for the world to see!

If you are a domaining blogger and want to set some goals for yourself and get the competitive juices flowing then be sure to check back often to see if you can move up in the rankings because the list is updated at least once a day (except for the most recent post column which is updated much more often).

If you made it on to the list of the Top 100 Domain Name Bloggers then be sure to check out our widget award that allows you to show off your award and real time ranking on your site - all you have to do is copy and paste and the widget shows off your ranking in real time every time your blog page loads. Click here to check out the widget award.

Check out this video from the entrepreneur boot camp of Tina Seelig during the Stanford Technology Venture Program. Tina recounts a classroom experiment that she did that involved her dividing the class up into teams who were given the goal of making as much money as they could in 2 hours and only having $5 to start out with. This video is just chock full of awesomeness on so many levels and I could blather on for a few thousand words about different applications to domaining, building an online business, etc. etc. ad nauseum but rather than do that I would challenge you to stop watching puppies play the piano or whatever on YouTube for just a moment and devote the next 6 minutes and 11 seconds to watching THIS VIDEO.

When you are done watching the video then leave a comment below and see if you could beat any of the money making ideas that some of the students had using the $5 startup capital and 2 hour time limit constraints…. (or if you are really brave then leave a comment below BEFORE watching the video and then watch the video to see if your idea was better than any of their ideas….)

Alan Dunn had written a post earlier about Ad.ly that had a great little statement in it:

“The first step to success is to quit reading domain blogs – even this one – and focus on SEO, online marketing and viral marketing blogs.”

I love that statement and I was about to type out a long comment to compliment him but I decided that the comment was getting too long so I would just give him a quick compliment via his comment form and steal the meat of my comment for this post (Sorry Alan ).

The reason I love that statement is because it seems that the time line of my “career” as an entrepreneur seems to be exactly the opposite career path of many domainers (although I could be wrong as this is just what I have seen first hand). I was first a small business owner then an “SEO” and then lastly a domainer. I owned (and still own) a Florida health insurance agency and so of course being the nerd that I am I wanted to put up a website to help people compare health insurance plans online.

Once the website was up and running I quickly realized that I actually needed to get people to visit the site in order to make any money

This caused me to learn as much as I could about SEO and about all of the various factors that went into building a quality website that would give the search engines and most importantly the website visitors exactly what they were looking for. Once I started ranking the website high for its target keywords and working hard to provide a ton of high quality content on the site and a great user experience I naturally wanted to duplicate the process on other websites.

The more I learned about SEO the more I came to appreciate the importance of keyword domain names. An exact match keyword domain name is the one key element of a winning online strategy that cannot be duplicated. Let me say that again: your domain name cannot be duplicated.

If we can agree that domain names have inherent value (because of keywords, length, TLD, and any other combination of these 25 rules for choosing a domain name) and that domain names are unique (fact) then it’s easy to see why having the best domain name for a given market niche online is a HUGE sustainable competitive advantage that even the deepest pocketed competitors cannot copy (unless they buy your domain name from you for $$$ and then well, that is OK too )

If you are the owner of say DogFood.com then you have a significant competitive advantage in building a business online in the “Dog Food” niche that even huge Fortune 500 companies cannot duplicate no matter how hard they try. Purina.com and Iams.com and other very large dog food companies can pay out the wazoo for the very best web developers and the very best SEO company and they can hire a professional writing service to churn out hundreds of pages of dog food related articles every day (and you thought that sorting through lists of dropped domains was boring… that is if you are not saving yourself time and red eyes by using our dropped domain alerts instead… ) BUT they can do all of these things but if you are the proud owner of DogFood.com then you have a very real and very sustainable competitive advantage that they cannot copy

(Note, I chose the domain name “DogFood.com” randomly just because my Bull Mastiff Caesar and my Pit/Lab mix Mercedes both just got done chowing down and they now need some more dog food. Also, I just noticed that if you type in DogFood.com it redirects to PetsMart.com so it appears that at least PetsMart.com recognizes the value of this domain).

All of that to say that if you are a domainer then its time for you to branch out and learn as much as you can about SEO, online marketing, and general business skills. If you are a business owner then you need to learn as much as you can about the value of domain names and about bringing your business online. If you are an SEO professional then you need to quickly appreciate the impact that domain names can have on your search engine optimization efforts.

What about you? What is your story?

Recently, we’ve had a lot of requests from subscribers and visitors to add the capability to find .org domains with the TITF, so we’ve been looking around to find a good API or method that would allow us to bulk check .org domains.

We’ve found some options but so far all of them are either prohibitively expensive or black hat, so we thought we’d put the question to our readers. Do any of you know of any API’s or legit methods for bulk checking .org domains? If anyone gives a suggestion that we end up using, we’ll give you a free subscription to our Domain Superstar premium membership. The contest is on! What solution do you propose?

Versailles.com is in the early stages of development, but we’re very excited about the possibilities the site offers. Neither Joel nor I have a lot of experience developing geos, but we both thought this would be a good domain to dip into the geo market with.

Domain Strengths
We grabbed this domain for a variety of reasons, but here’s some of the strengths we see in the domain:

• 301,000 exact monthly searches (strong type-in potential)
• Huge tourist destination - over 2 million visitors to Versailles, France a year.
• TON of potential advertisers between hotels, tours companies, restaurants, etc.
• I’m a huge francophile

Potential Drawbacks
Although we obviously think Versailles.com is a great domain, there are a couple potential drawbacks or risks that we are attempting to solve.

• English or French? - Only 60,000 of the 301,000 monthly searches are from the US. Many are from tourist across the world, and many others are from French citizens. Should we concentrate our initial development efforts in English or French? Either way we could be losing some potential traffic.
• Tourist Location vs Local Portal - Many geos are developed as portals for a specific location and the content of the site is geared towards getting repeat visitors from people in a particular city. Since Versailles is a huge tourist destination, we need to appeal to tourist as well as locals.

Current Development
Versailles.com is using a modified WooThemes theme. Since Versailles is such a huge tourist destination, we tried to pick a theme that can really showcase a lot of pictures. Flickr has been a great resource, where we’ve found thousands of free Versailles pictures available for commercial use

Our plan is to initially concentrate on cranking out very high quality original content for Versailles tours and Versailles hotels, then to move on to other content, keeping an eye on our traffic to see what sources are bringing in most of our traffic. Once we’ve built up out traffic, our monetization strategy is advertising on a yet-to-be-determined platform.

So that’s our plan in a nutshell. How would you develop it? What are your thoughts on the domain? Feel free to unload with both barrels…all feedback is welcome!

Today, we’ve just released our Premium Domain Finder, which allows you to search that inventory through our easy-to-use interface. The tool allows searching for premium names using the following criteria:

Search Term: Look for domains that start with, end with, or contain your search term.
TLD: Filter the results by one or more TLDs. (Let us know if there are any more TLDs you’d like to filter buy)
Price Range: Search for domains from one to millions of dollars and every price in between!
Number of Characters: Search for short or long domains.

This new tool is currently completely free to use, so go give it a spin on our domain tool dashboard!

We’d love to hear what you think, so leave feedback, comments, and suggestions below!

Come on, I know that all of us get the urge to brag about some of the great deals that we have gotten or how we were smart enough to spot a money making trend years in advance or how we were able to grab a great domain and immediately flip it for a great profit or monetize it to bring in boatloads of cash and we just can’t wait to have someone ask this question so out with it.

The contest is on! What is the best domain name investment you have ever made?

PS To many who are in the same boat as me when it comes to NDA’s then just give your second (or third or fourth) best domain name investment and let’s all chant together “I will not break my NDA. I will not break my NDA. I - ” OK, you get the point

Keyword Matching Options - The ability to choose to have the tool return either “EXACT MATCH”, “BROAD MATCH”, or “PHRASE MATCH” (all of the data from this tool is returned real time for every search directly from Google so if you are familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool then you understand the importance of being able to distinguish between these different types of keyword data options).

# of Domains - The ability to have the tool return from 20 different domains all the way up to 200 domains (all exact match keyword domain names according to the data provided real time from Google).

Geo Targeting - The ability to choose to view domains generated from the Google data for a given language and/or a given targeted location (for example, German domainers could change the “Target Language” from the default of English to German and change the “Targeted Location” from the default of United States to Germany and then all of the domains generated would have data from Google.de)

Exact Match Premium Domains - In the prior version of the TITF the tool would show a result of either “Available to Register” if the domain name was available for hand registering or “Backorder Now” if the domain was already registered. Now the tool is fully integrated with NameMedia so that any domain that is not available to hand register is now searched for against the entire 2,000,000 + domain names in the NameMedia portfolio so that when a match is found there will be either a “Buy Now” price shown or a “Make an Offer” displayed to convey that the domain is up for sale.

Related Premium Domains - A new tab has been added to the tool titled “Related Premium Domains” that offers suggested domains that are available for sale that are related to the keywords entered into the TITF.

Here is an example of how I can use the new features of the tool to find great exact match keyword domain names:

GOAL: I want to find exact match keyword .net domain names in the “health” niche.

First I go directly to the Type In Traffic Finder on our tools dashboard and I enter the general keyword of health (the goal is to start out with the most general keyword and then use some of the keywords generated by the tool to re-seed the tool with more specific keywords to hone in on a given niche or sub niche), I choose the TLD .net, I set the number of results to 200, I leave the search type set to “EXACT”, and I leave the default Target Language set to English and the default Targeted Location set to the United States:

As you can see from the above screenshot there are a number of very nice health related .net domain names that are either available to hand register like HealthBeliefModel.net (10,300 Global Monthly Exact Match searches), VinegarHealthBenefits.net (3,400 Global Monthly Exact Match searches) or available to purchase like HealthTips.net for $1,888 BUY Now (34,700 Global Monthly Exact Match searches), KidsHealth.net for $7,188 BUY Now (30,100 Global Monthly Exact Match searches) or make an offer on like HealthEducation.net (18,500 Global Monthly Exact Match searches) etc. etc.

What is really amazing is that even with a very general keyword like “Health” where one would expect almost every single closely related domain name to already be taken the tool still returns some very impressive domains to both hand register and buy from a 3rd party.

Before we begin seeding the the tool with some of these keywords that were returned from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and suggested to us via the TITF we want to first click on the “Related Premium Domains (200 loaded)” tab to see what other additional domains might be an attractive acquisition:

As you can see from the above screenshot there are a number of attractive “Related Premium Domains” suggested to us. Some of the nicer domains out of the 200 suggested include HealthJobs.net for $3,388 Buy Now, HealthMassage.net for $3,060 Buy Now, and HealthIns.net for $359 Buy Now.

Now of course the tool really starts to shine when you are looking for long tail exact match keyword domain names so one of the best ways to do this successfully is to take some of the suggested keywords and plug them right back into the tool and run it again. Since all of the keywords on the first tab are coming real time direct from Google’s servers with Google’s most up to date keyword data then it makes sense to look at these keywords and see dig deeper.

I am going to take the keyword “health supplements” from the first tab and plug that back into the tool and see what comes up. When I leave all of the settings the same and plug in “health supplements” this is what I see:

As you can see from the screenshot above there are a number of quite nice domains both available to hand register like CLASupplement.net (2,100 Global Monthly Exact Match searches), MemoryVitamins.net (1,400 Global Monthly Exact Match searches) as well as purchase like SportsNutrition.net for $5,888 Buy Now (24,600 Global Monthly Exact Match searches), CalciumSupplements.net for $988 Buy Now (9,200 Global Monthly Exact Match searches), and many others to make offers on (not to mention the 200 domains that are displayed on the “Related Premium Domains” tab that I will not take the time to talk about.

As you can see from taking a look at just a couple screenshots of this tool the only real limitation to finding as many exact match keyword domain names with potential type in traffic is simply your imagination. If you can think up a starter keyword, no matter how general or broad the niche, the Type In Traffic Finder will consistently give you all of the rabbit trails you could possibly want to wander down to find a ton of high quality keyword domains both available to hand register and available to buy from a 3rd party.

With real time keyword data direct from Google it’s hard to go wrong. What are you waiting for? Head on over to our dashboard to try out the TITF tool now!

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about here’s a little background. The Type-In Traffic Finder accesses Google provided metrics on search volume for keywords. For example, if I type in “car insurance” into the tool, I can see how many times per month the phrase “car insurance” is searched for. Google captures this data using three different metrics, Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match. Broad Match is the number of monthly searches that include your search terms, plus other similar searches and synonyms (for example, “auto insurance”). Phrase Match is the number of monthly searches that include your search terms somewhere in the search (like “boston car insurance”). Exact match is the the number of times the exact phrase you entered is searched every month (only exact searches for “car insurance”). As you can probably see Exact Match is by far the best indication of Type-In Traffic potential because you can see exactly how many times every month your keyword phrase is searched for.

The reason we just added Exact Match today is that Google previously did not offer that information in the previous version of its API. The new version adds Exact Match as well as many more features that we will be integrating into the tool.

Look to see the following features added into the new version of the Type-In Traffic Finder: geographic location options (optimize the suggested keywords and monthly searches by location), keyword domains and suggestions for multiple languages, and selection of the desired broadness of the monthly search numbers (Broad, Phrase, or Exact).

In addition, we are happy to announce a partnership with NameMedia, a company with a domain inventory of over 2,000,000 domains. We will be integrating their portfolio into the Type-In Traffic Finder, so that our members can easily see if domains are available for sale even if they are not available for hand-registration.

Keep an eye on the tool, as we will be rolling these features out over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, what are you waiting for? Go try out the Type-In Traffic Finder today!