Domain Superstar Dashboard – Now with .ORG
As Joel recently blogged, we’ve been hard at work updating our dashboard and revamping the back-end of our tools.
The biggest update is that we’ve added .ORG lookups to our Type-In Traffic Finder, Bulk Keyword Checker, and Geo-Domain tools for premium members. A lot of our users have been asking for this feature for a long time, and we were finally able to get access to the .ORG zone file which enables us to locally keep track of all available domains.
We’ve also added some other incremental updates
- Added Snapnames and Auction Pus to our All-In-One Auction tool
- Added advanced search options for our Keyword Domain repository
- Moved to faster servers
We’re also researching new tools to build and are applying for zone file access for all of the different TLDs, which will allow us to provide nearly instantaneous lookups for domain availability checks.
Lastly, we’ve introduced a $10 day pass which gives premium access to all our tools for 24 hours. This option works nicely for those who aren’t domaining every day, but would occasionally like to use our tools to find some premium domains.
We hope you like the updates and look forward to seeing you on our site! Feel free to leave any new tool ideas or features you’d like to see in the comments!
What is the Best Way to do .org Bulk Domain Availability Checking?
Some of you may have noticed that many of our tools that do bulk domain availability lookups (like our Type In Traffic Finder) don’t support .org domains. The reason for this is because the .org WHOIS servers have very tight quotas for checking .ORG domains (essentially, one search on our Type-In Traffic Finder would put us over since putting in just 1 keyword into the tool can return up to 200 related exact match keyword domains that all need to be bulk checked to see if they are available to register).
Recently, we’ve had a lot of requests from subscribers and visitors to add the capability to find .org domains with the TITF, so we’ve been looking around to find a good API or method that would allow us to bulk check .org domains.
We’ve found some options but so far all of them are either prohibitively expensive or black hat, so we thought we’d put the question to our readers. Do any of you know of any API’s or legit methods for bulk checking .org domains? If anyone gives a suggestion that we end up using, we’ll give you a free subscription to our Domain Superstar premium membership. The contest is on! What solution do you propose?
Case Study Friday: Versailles.com
by John
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!
New Tool: Premium Domain Finder!
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!
NEW Type In Traffic Finder 2.0: Now with Exact Match!!!
As many of you know, our Type In Traffic Finder is tool for finding great keyword domains. Up until now, however, one of the limitations of the tool was that it would only display Broad Match monthly searches. Well, as of this evening, we are now showing Exact Match monthly searches! In our opinion, this greatly enhances the utility of the tool and makes it that much more useful in evaluating keyword domains.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about here’s a little background. The Type-In Traffic Finder accesses Google provided metrics on search volume for keywords. For example, if I type in “car insurance” into the tool, I can see how many times per month the phrase “car insurance” is searched for. Google captures this data using three different metrics, Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match. Broad Match is the number of monthly searches that include your search terms, plus other similar searches and synonyms (for example, “auto insurance”). Phrase Match is the number of monthly searches that include your search terms somewhere in the search (like “boston car insurance”). Exact match is the the number of times the exact phrase you entered is searched every month (only exact searches for “car insurance”). As you can probably see Exact Match is by far the best indication of Type-In Traffic potential because you can see exactly how many times every month your keyword phrase is searched for.
The reason we just added Exact Match today is that Google previously did not offer that information in the previous version of its API. The new version adds Exact Match as well as many more features that we will be integrating into the tool.
Look to see the following features added into the new version of the Type-In Traffic Finder: geographic location options (optimize the suggested keywords and monthly searches by location), keyword domains and suggestions for multiple languages, and selection of the desired broadness of the monthly search numbers (Broad, Phrase, or Exact).
In addition, we are happy to announce a partnership with NameMedia, a company with a domain inventory of over 2,000,000 domains. We will be integrating their portfolio into the Type-In Traffic Finder, so that our members can easily see if domains are available for sale even if they are not available for hand-registration.
Keep an eye on the tool, as we will be rolling these features out over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, what are you waiting for? Go try out the Type-In Traffic Finder today!
Case Study Friday: Credit Card Chaser Part 2
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!
Javascript Libraries – Adding polish to your site the easy way
by John
The more web development I do, the more I’m grateful for the plethora of amazing Javascript libraries out there. It’s never been simpler to add advanced front-end functionality like drag-and-drop, animations, or sortable, paginated, searchable tables (like those used in our Type-In Traffic Finder, for instance). Here’s a few of my favorite javascript libraries.
1. YUI
YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) is one of my favorite Javascript libraries. The vast majority of our domain tool dashboard is written using it. YUI has probably the best collection of widgets and user interface elements of any Javascript library, as well as great documentation, and great community support. It does tend to be more complicated and verbose than some other libraries when doing simple DOM manipulation, but that should change when YUI 3 is released.
2. JQuery
JQuery is currently my favorite Javascript library. If you’re a web developer and you’re not familiar with
it, I highly recommend learning it as soon as possible. JQuery’s tagline is “write less, do more” and that pretty much sums up my experience with it. Writing code in jQuery is very concise, but very powerful. One of my favorite features: Any DOM element can be animated just by calling the animate() function and then specifying the CSS property to animate (opacity or height for instant). JQuery also has many widgets in their jQuery UI library, but it is not as fully developed as YUI.
3. Prototype/Scriptaculous
I have less experience with Prototype and Scriptaculous, than with YUI and jQuery, but this is another mature and well-known library. Prototype focuses on DOM manipulation and more core functionality, and Scriptaculous is a UI library built on top of Prototype. These libraries are included with or supported by many popular web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CakePHP.
Even if you’re not a developer you can use these libraries to snaz up your site.
You can find many good tutorials on adding javascript effects at NetTuts. There are many other sites with lots of prebuilt widgets and tutorials that can be found via Google.
So what do you think? Any other libraries or resources to add?
New Tool: Bulk Keyword Domain Finder
Today we’re pleased to announce the release of our new Bulk Keyword Domain Finder tool. This tool allows users to bulk-check the availability of keyword or keyword phrase domains (for instance, entering the phrase “domain superstar” would check the availability of “domainsuperstar.com”.
This tool is available to both free and premium members, but premium members get some significant features. Below is a table describing the two versions of the tool.
| Feature | Free | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Max number of phrases | 20 | 200 |
| File Uploading | No | Yes (up to 1000 phrases) |
| TLDs | .COM only | Multiple TLDs |
For premium members we currently offer .COM, .NET, .INFO, .BIZ, .US, .DE, .FR as our available TLDs but will add more upon the request of our premium members. Also, as mentioned above, premium members can upload files containing 1 keyword or phrase per line to conveniently check up to 1000 keywords at a time. We can also process larger numbers of domains on our servers, so if you’re interested please contact us.
Please try out this tool and let us know what you think!
Google Maps + GeoDomaining = A New Way To Make $$$
Here at Domain Superstar we’ve been working like crazy to create new, unique, premium tools for our members. Today we’re announcing the release of a ground-breaking new tool that utilizes Google Maps, GeoNames.org, and domain availability checking to help our members find great, valuable geodomains.
Although many of you are already familiar with the concept of geodomaining, I’d like to give a little background for those of you who aren’t. Briefly, geodomains are any domains that are tied to a geographical location like NewYork.com, London.co.uk, or France.fr. In addition, geo-domains often have keywords associated with a particular location (HartfordDoctor.com, ChicagoCarInsurance.com, etc).
Many geodomains have the potential to be very lucrative for the owner. Many types of search engine queries only make sense in the context of the searcher’s geographic location. If someone is looking for a doctor, chances are they are going to look for a doctor in a city near them (this can also apply to real estate, lawyers, and countless other niches). Having a geodomain that exactly matches these searches gives the owner the opportunity to capture and monetize the majority of this traffic.
Our GeoDomain Finder allows our premium members to find these geodomains with ease. The tool uses the Google Map’s location to find all towns or cities in the immediate area, then checks to see if domains using those towns or cities are available. Free members can check the availability of .COM domains for any of these locations. Premium members, however, can check multiple tlds, add keywords before or after the location name, and can optionally include the state code with the location name. These features on this tool alone easily justify the $47/month premium membership fee (which will be increasing to $77/month for new members who sign up after May 1)!
To try out this tool for yourself, head to our dashboard now!
A New Tool For Dictionary Domains – Over 700 Available!
Here at Domain Superstar we’ve been really busy coming up with exciting new tools for our members. Just in the last week we’ve added the geo-domain finder Google Maps mashup and the bulk keyword domain finder to our beta dashboard, where you can preview the full versions of these tool before they are added to the main site (when full functionality will only be available for premium members).
In addition to these two new tools, we’re moving our Dictionary Domain Tool out of beta and onto the main dashboard. This tool scans all of our domain repositories (auctions, dropped and dropping domains, and our keyword domain repository) to find available 1 word dictionary domains available for hand-registration. You may be surprised to find out that dictionary domains are still available, but we have over 700 of them available for registration right now in this tool! In fact, as mentioned in our last blog post, Joel just used it to hand-register Leucadendron.com, a type of flower, that has a CPC of $0.63 and 590 exact monthly searches in Google.
Both free members and premium members can access this tool, but free members will only be able to see the available .COM domains. Premium members will have full access to all 700+ domains in our dictionary domain tool, so sign up for the premium membership to find all of the great domains available for registration.
We’d also like to mention that on May 1 our price for new premium members will be going up to $77 so sign up for our premium membership now to lock in your low monthly rate of $47 (which will never go up)!
So go find some dictionary domains…and when you do, be sure to let us know about it in the comment section!
Update: We had a few people mention that they were having problems viewing the dictionary domains using Internet Explorer. This issue is now fixed and the tool will work for all browsers.
