In the world of real estate, all sorts of things factor into the value of a property. As you probably know if you’ve purchased a home before, one of the biggest factors in determining the value of a property (and resale value) is location. If you are a business that deals with walk-in customers such as restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations, you are wanting a good location with a lot of people that pass by. In the world of domains, in order to find success, you need to train yourself to look for many of the same things that people look for in real estate. Here are the five things that I take into account when I’m considering buying a domain:

1. Domain Length - Domains with more than 13 letters can be difficult to sell in most cases, unless you have a domain that is the name of an established business.
2. Memorable – This kind of goes along with #1. A domain needs to be easy to remember for a business, and it needs to be easy to remember for a domainer. If you are cash parking, you are counting on a large amount of traffic from people entering your domain into their web browser.
3. Easily Spelled – If the word(s) in your domain are hard to spell or can be spelled in multiple ways, it probably is best to avoid it. This also applies for words that are spelled differently depending on the language they are spelled in.
4. Includes Keywords – A potential buyer for the domain will probably come to you because all good domains with their keyword are taken, so they want to purchase an established domain. Generic domains can be good as well, but will require more marketing to sell, where you will often get direct offers for keyword-rich domains without any work.
5. Avoid Plural – The name of this site used to have Kyle’s in it, but that was a mistake I made long ago and rarely did a day go by that I didn’t regret it. People would think my name is either Kyles Eslick or Kyle Scove. That is why I’m so adamant about avoiding plural when it comes to domain names.

The above five examples are intended to be used as a guideline. For example, I do purchase domains longer than 13 letters occasionally, but it isn’t ideal if I’m looking to resell it. I try to only do so if they are the EXACT keywords someone would use to do a search.

How do I buy Domain Names?

When I go to buy domain names, I always use a service called PCNames (full review here). You simply input a desired domain name or a keyword you want to use, then search. PCNames will then display a bunch of available names using that keyword, and I’ve found they often make some great suggestions. Once you’ve found one you want to purchase, click Select and pick your registrar of choice. Going through them you get help finding your domain and you get a discount (for example dot com domains are $7.15 at GoDaddy when referred by PCNames).

What registrar should I use to buy domain names?

I get this question a lot. Does it really matter? Yes and no. I usually recommend people use GoDaddy altogether, or at least to register domains that they intend to flip, because it is the most popular registrar. This makes it a lot easier to transfer a domain from one person to another because their are better odds that a potential buyer either uses GoDaddy, or at least has a GoDaddy account to house the domain. Transferring from one GoDaddy account to another is really easy, but transferring between registrars adds some extra hassle.

What is this domain worth?

If you follow the above steps 1-5 and find one that meets that criteria, you should have a fairly valuable domain name. As long as the name is short, brandable, and avoids hyphens and other things, it has a lot of potential. A domain is technically worth what someone will pay for it, so its hard to nail down an actual value of a dot com domain name. But once you’ve come up with your price on that, though, you can follow the 1/10/30 rule to determine the other TLD values. This means that a dot net version of the domain is worth about 10% of the dot com counterpart, and the dot info version is worth about one third of the dot net value (or 1/30th of the dot com domain value).

You’ll find that domainers will often closely monitor what similar domains are selling for to determine the value of their domains. Another thing that increases a domains value is natural traffic (traffic coming from users entering the URL into their web browser). These will sell a lot better than one that doesn’t have natural traffic because you can easily monetize them using cash parking techniques.