Evaluating Domains For Development

[Nametra.com]

Greetings:

I've been buying and selling domains since 1999. Over the years I've developed some simple landing pages for a few, but nothing ever too in depth or complex.

I'm now looking to develop some of the more capable / quality domains in my portfolio into full scale websites, but I'm struggling to decide which of them would be most suitable for development. I think I have a lot of domains with great potential, but too many options is sometimes not a good thing.

Interests aside, are there any recommendations in terms of which sites are most suitable for development? For example, I've got some domains suitable for product sales, some for niche sites, some for job boards or listing sites, some for portals, some for blogs, etc.

Are there any good sources of information on the pre-development / evaluation process that you can share?

Also, are there any companies that can help or partner with you through the development process and have any of you worked with them?

Thanks in advance!


Andy

 

[poweredbyme]

If the website will make money from ads or selling things of others, it will need organic (free of charge) traffic to be profitable. SEO is an extremely complex thing for everyone. What you may need to know is that the domain will not matter much in most cases.

If the website will make money via selling something you produce or buy, then the domain has importance. Because you would want branding the business.

For the last 10-15 years choosing the right domain is usually not the most important thing unless you sell your own products on a website. From SEO perspective almost all normal domains are almost equal, excluding extremes such as domains with 30 characters, with different language to content, with non-latin characters, etc. Especially TLD has almost no effect, excluding country extensions.

Which sites are worth to develop question has a broad, boring, long answer. If you will not sell your own product, then you will rely on organic (free of charge) traffic flow to the website. That's the main thing for that type of websites. If you will sell your own products, expected profit would likely pay promotion costs, hence organic traffic would not be the most critical part.

I developed various types of websites on various CMS's as well as hand written static HTML sites for 20 years or so. I sold most of them and then lost motivation. It's one of the toughest businesses, is probably 100x more complex than domaining. If domaining is profitable for you, I would suggest going on with domaining unless learning new things is highly enjoyable thing for you.

 

[koolishman]

Interests aside, are there any recommendations in terms of which sites are most suitable for development?

I look at the domain name and immediately decide if it is worth developing. Even in a crowded place, a domain name can make the difference, other things being equal.

But, ultimately, your work on the site matters. You have to be persistent, and constantly monitor traffic and adjust.

 

[Nametra.com]

Thank you poweredbyme and koolishman for your replies!

There seem to be a lot of people like Peter Askew (Bobbleheads.com, RanchWork.com) who have taken great domain names and made successful sites from them. I wish more of these people would share their experiences.

Are there good sources of information on developing domains? There doesn't seem to be too much on this forum.

 

[poweredbyme]

Thank you poweredbyme and koolishman for your replies!

There seem to be a lot of people like Peter Askew (Bobbleheads.com, RanchWork.com) who have taken great domain names and made successful sites from them. I wish more of these people would share their experiences.

Are there good sources of information on developing domains? There doesn't seem to be too much on this forum.

Because this is "domaining forum". You will find too much info on webmaster forums. I'm more of a webmaster than a domainer. I wish you good luck on your webmaster journey.

 

[Nametra.com]

Thank you.

 

[Sjpals]

Thank you poweredbyme and koolishman for your replies!

There seem to be a lot of people like Peter Askew (Bobbleheads.com, RanchWork.com) who have taken great domain names and made successful sites from them. I wish more of these people would share their experiences.

Are there good sources of information on developing domains? There doesn't seem to be too much on this forum.

https://www.nichepursuits.com/ focuses on blogs, but has some good stuff
It depends on the type you want to develop, either ecommerce or information based blogs (that you monitise)

The advice I had, I think it was from empire flippas many years ago, was that after google had the crackdown on spammy sites, its deemed any exact match keywords to be 'potentially' spammy. eg handbags.com Therefore a 2 word combo that can be branded (one word being a keyword, like blue handbag, totally made up) is more appropriate.

I personally like single word dictionary words that are not direct keywords such as candlesticked, braceleted, etc as I feel they are catchy, so audiences will remember them and they can potentially be branded.

In the end, Google now prioritises the most relevant content to the search, and the search intent (eg is the user looking to buy or just get information), so keywords in domains no longer have anywhere near as much relevance as they did (perhaps not even at all anymore).

I would also say, in general, other criteria for me are -
what domains do I have that dont have a good resale value (because I bought them for ecomms and not domain investment).
What type of sites can I sell (what are you best at building, who do you think you can sell that to)

 

[Nametra.com]

Thanks for the response.

All due respect to empire flippas (I'm not sure who they are), but I don't see how a domain like YummyNuts.com would be preferrable to the keyword domain Nuts.com or BlueCars.com would be more "appropriate" than Cars.com.

I have some ultra premium domains like Ingredient.com and I would like to think that if I developed this domain and followed good business practices (including not spamming) that Google would reward my site and not consider it spammy.