I started sharing some thoughts based on my experiences with domain names having reached my two (2) year mark in the domains industry. See Part 1 here.
I attempted to establish that;
The reason why other people spend money on domain names is not the inherent value of the name itself but the POTENTIAL that it has to actually provide value to other people through an app, website or redirect.
Which Domain Names Do I Develop?
How do I know which domain names are worthy of development? A good indication are the ones getting random people asking for a product/service in your make offer landing page. Also, the ones that show consistent traffic every single day irrespective of the type of lander used (possibly indicating typo traffic).
Working at a registrar, there are oftentimes multiple visits to one particular landing page with a strong keyword domain name. The visitors come into customer care chat thinking they have reached an established service. Most of the times these visits are direct visits (type ins).
My intention is to take my readers on a journey to:
- Prove to you that domain names can solve a problem and add value to people while you wait on them to be sold.
- Show that developing domain names can bring in a stream of income for the domainer which otherwise would not be possible on a for sale lander.
- Attempt to make this a reality in public, right before your eyes to prove or disprove my premise.
- Encourage creativity in the domaining community.
An Insight Into Direct/Type-In Traffic
Of the domains I own, I want to choose one that has had consistent traffic day after day and make a small site there to generate some income. I will choose a domain name that I purchased this year, have analysed for a few months and I will develop a small site and we will see where it goes from there.
A few months ago, I got a .top domain on a $0.99 promo. I wasn’t really interested in the.top extension before this but I wanted to see what they were all about.
I did a search on Namebio.com and found that .top sales were mostly pinyin constructed names.
In light of this, I thought perhaps, there would be a popular compound word in english with “top” in it that could be registered as a domain hack. Using Google’s Keyword Planner, I started analysing search terms with “top”. It turns out the word “Peplum Top” was one unregistered domain hack in the list of top search terms.
List of Popular Terms
I did a quick google search and found that a Peplum Top was actually a type women’s top wear. It made sense so I registered the name Peplum.Top and started my analysis. It was only $0.99 so no harm done right?
I realised that within a few days of registration, the traffic was relatively high. Of 150 names, it was receiving in the top 5 number of visits.
I wanted to find out more, so I put up a parking page on Bodis.com and here’s what I found:
Monthly Visits
Countries Visits Came From
Click-Through Rate
Terms Clicked
As I don’t like reading long blogs myself and owing to the fact that social media has diminished our attention span so significantly, I will wrap up Part 2 for now and open up with more on what I discovered about this traffic in Part 3.
It’s very very interesting where I will be taking this and I think you will be intrigued too. The name has already paid for itself and this experiment will extract the rest of value from the domain. Look out on my twitter profile where I will post Part 3.
