For the third installment of Case Study Friday, we’re going to look at one of Joel and my newer acquisitions, Versailles.com. Weeks one and two focused on CreditCardChaser.com, one of Joel’s finance-related sites. The posts generated a lot of discussion.

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!

Tags: Case Study Friday

New Tool: Premium Domain Finder!

by John

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Last week, in our Type-In Traffic 2.0 blog post, we announced our new partnership with NameMedia, giving us access to their inventory of over 2,000,000 premium domain names.

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!

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What is the Best Domain Name Investment You Have Ever Made?

by Joel Ohman

18 Comments

What is the absolute best domain investment that you have ever made?

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

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Type In Traffic Finder 2.0: Premium Domains, Geo Targeting, and More!

by Joel Ohman

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A few days ago John posted that we had just released the new exact match capability to the Type In Traffic Finder and as of tonight we have also added some additional exciting new features. Here is a breakdown of the new features (and then I will show some screenshots detailing what some of the features are and how they can actually help you find great exact match keyword domain names quite easily):

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!

Tags: Domain Name Tools

NEW Type In Traffic Finder 2.0: Now with Exact Match!!!

by John

Case Study Friday: Credit Card Chaser Part 2

by John

1 Comment

Last week, in our inaugural CreditCardChaser.com. Today, I’m going to pick up where he left off and provide some insight into the technical aspects of the site and the “Chaser” tool.

As Joel mentioned last week, Credit Card Chaser is built on top of Wordpress and uses a modified WooThemes theme. However, the “Chaser” itself is completely custom.

The front-end is built using the fabulous JQuery UI javascript library. I’ve sang the praises of JQuery before, but this was my first project using the newer UI library. JQuery UI provides simple and powerful methods for implementing all sorts of eye-candy, including drag-and-drop, tabs, accordions, and animations, making it a breeze to implement some really fancy user interfaces.

Joel and I played around with a lot of the different JQuery animation effects on the credit card results page, but in the end opted to simply hide and show cards based on the criteria chosen by the user. We found that trying to animate a large number of cards at the same time when showing or hiding a lot of cards tended to be distracting as well as sometimes bogging down the browser.

The back-end of the Chaser is custom PHP. This code takes care of loading and displaying the correct cards on the initial load of the results page. Joel also needed a way to manage his inventory of credit cards, so I developed an administrative application using CakePHP, which allows Joel to easily add, edit, or delete credit cards from the application, as well as allowing him to assign categories and other attributes to the cards. CakePHP makes it very easy to set up a quick application like this and gives Joel a good way to securely and easily edit the credit cards on the site.

Well, that’s the architecture of CreditCardChaser.com in a nutshell. While I understand that not all of the domainers who read this blog are programmers or technical, I hope some of the stuff I’ve talked about has piqued your interest and given you an idea of some of what’s out there. Next week, we’ll be back with another case study. If you have any suggestions or ideas of what you’d like us to talk about next, let us know in the comments!

Tags: Case Study Friday

Is Domaining.com Worth $3,000,000?

by Joel Ohman

33 Comments

Domaining.com is one of my favorite sites and I visit the site on a daily basis. If you have visited the site recently you most likely saw that Francois has the Domaining.com domain name listed for sale at a buy now price of $3,000,000 (the price does not include the website but Francois has mentioned that he may be willing to selling the website with the domain name if the price is right).

Some Positives:

- By far the most authoritative sounding domain name for anyone in the domaining niche
- Good (but not great) existing traffic level

Some Negatives:

- No real content (not a concern if one just wants to buy the domain but definitely a concern for someone wanting to buy the website)
- Limited revenue to date

Two questions for you:

A) How much do you think Domaining.com is worth? (please specify whether your are referring to just the domain name or the domain name + website)

B) How much do you think that Domaining.com will end up selling for? (if you guess within $10k of the sale price if any then you will win a 3 month free Domain Superstar premium membership with full access to all the premium features for our domain name tools)

Tags: Domain Name News

200 Keyword Domain Names for Sale

by Joel Ohman

Case Study Friday: CreditCardChaser.com

by Joel Ohman

10 Comments

ccc

Since it seems all the rage for domainers to talk about web development and SEO – with “talk” being the key word I thought it might be a fun thing to do to dedicate Fridays (or at least most Fridays) to do case studies of different development and SEO projects that either John or I have been doing or that we have noticed others doing. (If you like this idea then let us know in the comments below).

For today let’s take a look at a domain that I own that admittedly is not an exact match keyword domain name or a geo domain name as are most of my domains but is rather a brandable domain name: CreditCardChaser.com. The site is of course geared around helping people compare credit cards and “chase” down the best credit card offers.

While this site has been up for a little while with some basic content up I just recently decided to really put some time and effort into attempting to make this a great web property. In order to do this I enlisted the help of John to lend his coding genius to designing the “Chaser” tool that would actually compare the credit cards. I also used our Domain Superstar resident expert graphic designer Rachel to design a custom logo and to design some custom images for the tool interface.

If you look at the site carefully you will notice that it is built on a WordPress backend with a customized version of the “The Station” theme from Woo Themes as well as of course some heavy customizations added outside of WordPress.

A few of the things that I wanted to concentrate on to start the site off right was to slowly but surely add a lot of high quality unique content to the site. The site currently has around 200 pages of high quality credit card content on the site with many more articles on the way. My goal is to publish somewhere around 10-15 new pages and 5-10 new posts every week making sure that they are very high quality and of course unique.

While the site is still very new and I have only begun to really market the site by getting the name of the site out there with many of the top bloggers in the personal finance space the site does already have a little over 2,000 backlinks in Yahoo which is a good start. Most of the backlinks so far are of low to medium quality but with time the site will begin to attract some very high quality links.

The main attraction of the site is of course the very cool looking interface for “chasing” down and comparing credit cards but it is bolstered by its strong content as well in areas like the credit card FAQ section of the site (There are 20+ FAQ’s published as of the time of this post but I have 160 FAQ’s in total scheduled out to be published over the course of the next 3 or 4 months).

I have a lot of other ideas for the site as the site is far from finished but the “Chaser” tool works great and is a hopefully very informative and helpful aid for people looking to compare credit cards and find the one that will best meet their needs. Look for a “Case Study Friday” post in the future from John as he discusses some of the techniques that he used to develop the credit card finding tool on CreditCardChaser.com.

So, now is your chance to skewer the site if you do not like something about it or praise the site if you think that it is looking good so far. What say you?

Tags: Case Study Friday

Is GoDaddy Ripping Off Our Geo Domain Name Tool?

by Joel Ohman

7 Comments

If you have been a fan of our domain name tools for a while now then you are probably very familiar with our geo domain name tool. In fact, you have likely been using this tool for months. It now appears that GoDaddy is launching a tool in the near future that will be live on geo.godaddy.com and geodomainmap.com that appears to be spookily similar to our Geo Domain Name Tool.

You can visit our tool here: http://www.domainsuperstar.com/dashboard.php?tool=geo

You can read the full story about the GoDaddy GeoDomain Search Tool here: http://domainnamewire.com/2009/10/14/godaddy-launching-geodomain-search-tool

What do you think?

Tags: Domain Name Tools

Case Study Friday: Versailles.com

New Tool: Premium Domain Finder!

What is the Best Domain Name Investment You Have Ever Made?

Type In Traffic Finder 2.0: Premium Domains, Geo Targeting, and More!

NEW Type In Traffic Finder 2.0: Now with Exact Match!!!

Case Study Friday: Credit Card Chaser Part 2

Is Domaining.com Worth $3,000,000?

200 Keyword Domain Names for Sale

Case Study Friday: CreditCardChaser.com

Is GoDaddy Ripping Off Our Geo Domain Name Tool?

Tutorial Video #1: How to Choose Domain Names that Will Make You Money

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