I recently got started with domaining and bought my first domain.
It was through Godaddy.com and I just read that Godaddy isn't the way to go if you wanna park your domain(it's expensive?), you wanna head for Parked.com.
What will I have to do to get my domain parked at parked.com? Will I have to pay Godaddy to transfer etc.
Do people usually register domains with one registrar and park it with someone else?
and: Was it a bad idea to register with Godaddy considering I'll have to pay to park it, and if yes, where should I register my domains.
You just have to apply for an account at Parked. They do not offer accounts if they don't see value in your domain name, so if they knock you back you could use Namedrive or Sedo. They will give you an account. Then you just need to log into your Godaddy account and change the nameservers, which is free. Your domain stays registered at Godaddy.
Many people have domains registered at Godaddy, and most park elsewhere as Godaddy are not highly regarded for parking.
No, you will not pay to park it elsewhere. I personally find the Godaddy user interface horrible, but they are are ok to register names with.
Good luck!
P.S. If you don't want to register any more names at Godaddy, you could take a look at name.com. The site is less of an assault on your senses, and the check out is less annoying.
I've been using the Google Adwords keyword tool for a few hours and got around to registering a new couple of domains.
I fount out later that It might be a good idea to search for "phrase" or "exact" instead of "broad", to get a more accurate indication of the site's value in the search engines. The two domains I registered went from around 20k searches to 20-100.
I guess there's a question or two at the end of this; How many hits must a keyword phrase have before you decide to register it as a domain?
Also, let's use my first registered domain as an example: www.qualitymp3players.com ; It has 73 Approx Avg Search Volume in the keyword tool. So thats 73 searches every month with the exact phrase as my domain name. Will it appear on the top of the seach engine? and if not, how can I get people to visit it?
Planning on parking at parked.com when I get enough domain names.
Ok, so that was my second language question posing and a half.
Hope you get it, cuz I'm confused^^
I've been using the Google Adwords keyword tool for a few hours and got around to registering a new couple of domains.
I fount out later that It might be a good idea to search for "phrase" or "exact" instead of "broad", to get a more accurate indication of the site's value in the search engines. The two domains I registered went from around 20k searches to 20-100.
I guess there's a question or two at the end of this; How many hits must a keyword phrase have before you decide to register it as a domain?
Also, let's use my first registered domain as an example: www.qualitymp3players.com ; It has 73 Approx Avg Search Volume in the keyword tool. So thats 73 searches every month with the exact phrase as my domain name. Will it appear on the top of the seach engine? and if not, how can I get people to visit it?
Planning on parking at parked.com when I get enough domain names.
Ok, so that was my second language question posing and a half.
Hope you get it, cuz I'm confused^^
IMHO. I switched from ND to Parked almost a year ago. I would say parked pays better. But it will also depend on the specific domains you are wondering about. Some domains might pay better on one site than another, the best thing to do would be to test it out.
Agreed.
And back to Witness - according to Estibot Wordtracker is 0 per day for qualitymp3players.com.
I can imagine it might get some type in traffic though?
As to getting your site to first page on a search, it's not going to happen with the name parked. You should read up about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it's quite a complex subject and one I am just starting to learn myself.
The best advice I can give you is spend a month or so reading up on domaining here and elsewhere before you register a lot of names.
Also, think about whether you just want to buy & sell names, or invest time (and money) in developing them...
1; What is the requirements, if any, for someone to register a dot asia domain.
I have a few gems and would like to register if I can. They're offering to register dot asia at godaddy, but I'm sure I read something about there being some restrictions on it. Am I wrong?
2; What do you guys think about 3-4 word domains. I've heard it's a controversial subject. I might be totally newb here, but isn't there som value to keyword specific domain names? (even though they're long)
I've decided to register a couple domain names so far. They're totally different names and they probably have very different development potential and uses. They might not be the best, but I'm curious if I might use them for something anyway. So I would like some input and suggestions on how to manage them. Basically any info related to the application of them. Here are the domains.
I've registered a couple of more domains but I won't mention them in this post. Those are better candidates for an article about my first failures as a domainer.
QualityMp3Players would make for a great review site on Mp3 players. But as with anything, thats alot of time, effort, and money. As for the SofaBlogger it might be well suited for someone who makes a living, blogging, from a sofa? Im not sure, and thats why many times you will hear people say its worth alot to the right person. Like for me its not worth anything, but for someone in a different position it very well may be.
As for .asia, I think you need an asian address but I am unsure, dont quote me on that.
And 3-4 word domains. It totally depends, are you looking to develop or resell them? They do well with search engines but they are not the best bet if your looking to resell in the after market.
A couple of comments on things that were not answered or may need a little more clarification:
- Yes, use the exact match using brackets "[]"to get a clear idea of the traffic. Quotes may work about the same, but stick to brackets with the Google estimator, use quotes for exact matches when you search at the Google search engine.
- Not all parking services are the same and a domain that does little or nothing at one service may do well at another.
- When choosing a name for parking, go for high bid price, high traffic numbers, or both.
- If your domain does not have hyphens, you can only expect it to match search requests for the same words in the same order. If there are hyphens it's like spaces, so it's possible to get a match on the other words in the phrase after the first one, but don't expect much. And the domains with hyphens have much lower resale value in general. multi-word domains with hyphens can, and do perform well in some cases. My third-best domain for income this month is a 3-word .us domain with two hyphens. It has earned $22.51 so far this month. I also have a 4-word .info with hyphens that has earned $5.53 this month. On the down side, I have about 1,200 domains about about 900 of them have not earned anything this month.
- If your domains get little or no type-in traffic, you are not going to make any money. You should either get some hosting and put sites on the domains, or park them with a parking service that allows you to optimize your domain and promote it like you would a site. Make sure your parking provider allows this, other wise you may violate their rules, which could get your account closed. If you are unsure, ask them.
- I think .asia does have a residency requirement, but most registrars will provide that for you.
- Learn as much as you can before you register a lot of domain names. Just because we all registered stupid, ugly, and worthless domains in the beginning doesn't mean everyone else also has to do that. :-)
- The quality of a domain is really only important if you are parking or reselling. If you are going to develop a site you can get away with having somthing pretty bad if the site and the site's content is good. My first expired domain that I bought was Bizprolink-Internet.com. It had some traffic and links when I got it, but I knew it was bad. Now it has about 25 million deleted domain names and is my top site for income.
- Oh, about how much traffic does a domain need to get to be worth registering? It's hard to say, but I try to go for domains that have high bid prices. That way even if the traffic and clicks are low, I don't need to much to have the domain pay for itself. I have about 12 months to mess around with optimization, keywords, and promotion to get a domain to earn it's keep. If it doesn't do that I either sell it or drop it.
You've all been great help. A few more Q's though.
nielsencl, you mentioned "high bid prices" and that's a term I'm not familiar with. Does it relate to the buying and selling of domains thats already registered? And second, how does the price affect the domain when it's parked? You also mentioned that if a domain has a high bid price it doesn't take much for the site to pay for itself. How does a domain pay for itself when it doesn't have any traffic? Resale?
Super newbie here, so bear with me..
High traffic numbers; Where do you check this. Estibot/googleAdWords?
Type-in traffic; When people type the url in the address line?
After 3 days in the business I understand the concept of parking, but have no knowledge about other ways to use my domains. You mentioned hosting, wazzat? Also, I registered www.sofablogger.com. Right now there's just banners from Godaddy there. How can i start blogging?
Yeah, there it is. Thank you guys for helping me out.
Simply setup a blog like Wordpress with a trusted hosting provider which includes Fantastico with your shared hosting account. From there either find some rss feeds which you can directly have post to your blog or find a few content writers on the various freelance sites that are out there. I am sure your first domain qualitymp3players.com will receive some odd ball search engine traffic. SEO is not hard to do, but don't expect to shoot for the first page of google.
I would like to get some feedback on some estibot/adwords stats. They are both keyword specific 3-word domains.
1: ca 50% Advertiser competition and Approx average search volume of 110
Frequency (Google) 14100
in Anchor Text 875
in Title 1070
in URL 140
Backlinks 0
PageRank
Alexa Rank Not Ranked
Traffic (Visits / Day) N/A
PPC Ads # 17
Max PPC Bid $1.03
Overture/mo 82
Wordtracker/day 4
2: ca 40% Advertiser competition and Approx average search volume of 480
Frequency (Google) 276
in Anchor Text 23700
in Title 133
in URL 14
Backlinks 0
PageRank
Alexa Rank Not Ranked
Traffic (Visits / Day) N/A
PPC Ads # 17
Max PPC Bid $0.93
Overture/mo 191
Wordtracker/day 0
It tells me the potential traffic is near zero and the bid price is about a dollar. If you get any traffic to the domain and if you get any clicks, I would say it is very unlikly either domain will pay for itself in one year just from parking.
High bid prices refers to what advertisers are paying to bid on the keyword or keyword prhase of your domain. I use the Google Traffic Estimator to check how many people are searching for a phrase and what the potential traffic is. I have uploaded a screen print (below) so you can see what I look for. I took your two domains and also added two phrases that I thought should have some results. I sort this list by the last column of Estimated cost/day. Remember, this is not a domainer's tool it's an advertiser's tool. You are not going to be making the amount of money that is listed. But it does give you an indication of the earning potential of any domain. If you want a domain to make money, it needs lots of traffic or a high bid price. If can get both, you are the lucky one. :-) For parking, I generally don't register domains that are under $5-$10 a day, unless the bid price is over $10. If I can get just one click a month that pays $1 I am making a profit for the year.
You generally can't expect to ever get what you see for a bid price. My friend says the most he ever got was $28 for one click, and that doesn't happen often. I've had some that were $7, but not many. Most are less than $1 and about 3/4 of my domains are not earning anything at any one time. I have days where I make a few dollars and one day where I made $600. There is no pattern that I can find, it's like seeing what you can find washed up on the beach...!
The bid price is just for the keyword in the domain. You can also optimize your domain with other keywords and you try to find ones that have higher bid prices as well. For example I would not expect "free mp3" to have a high bid price, but "mp3 player reviews" may. The high bid price is not going to affect the sale of your domain much, and only if your buyer is going to park or develop the domain. It does show you know your product.
Yes, if a domain does not get any traffic, then it can't earn anything.
Yes, Type-in traffic is when people type the url in the address line. It's also called "direct navigation".
