Francois Carrillo is a businessman and domainer from France. He’s the owner/operator of the industry’s top news and info aggregation service, Domaining.com, and has dedicated time and resources into helping other domainers enhance, develop and sell domains to end users.

He is constantly improving Domaining.com and working on creating tools that ultimately markets to and sells buyers on the high value and importance of a good domain name. To that end, a tool for both domainers and end users is live, in beta and ready to appraise your names: Valuate.com.  Here is a screenshot of the homepage:

Valuate provides simple breakdowns on domain names only – not businesses built on domain names, not on domain names in languages other than English.  I liken the usefulness of this tool to that of the questions a journalist would ask when compiling information for a story.  The who?, what?, when?, where?, why? (and even how?) questions can play an important part when assessing the kinds of businesses, brands, products, services that can be marketed, built, sold on domain names – and at what price.

Relevant questions such as ‘what topics, services, information, products are people looking up in the search engines and what search terms/keywords are they using?’,

‘where in the world are your visitors/shoppers located? if most of your visitors are located throughout the world, is your site optimized to receive or process international currency?’,

‘why are they looking/shopping – for research purposes for a school paper or project?, to comparison shop for the best prices for gifts?, are they just looking and not planning to purchase at all?,

‘when or what time of day are your local or global customers shopping? are you making sure that you’re not scheduling system maintenance during busy online shopping hours?,

‘how are your site visitors viewing your site? via a mobile device? is your site optimized for the iPhone?

Who would buy, acquire, build a business/product/service on a particular domain name that you’re selling? An end user?, small business owner?, huge multinational corporation?, crafter who wants to sell his stuff and wants visibility on the internet? It doesn’t hurt to know a domain name’s estimated worth or use Valuate’s tools as a reference to determine a selling price. Valuate can help answer some of those ‘W’ questions. I’ve tested the tool with one of my names. I kept it simple and input cloth mask/s.com in the box on the left and clicked valuate.

Here’s a screenshot of Valuate.com’s breakdown of these names:

Valuate is powered by Estibot (another useful domain service and tool) and gives information about your name (see above) such as search term/keyword frequency in Google’s engine, traffic to the domain, the average cost per click on a particular search term, the availability of the domain in other extensions.

Test the Valuate tool and perhaps discover some things you didn’t know about your domains before that can help you make decisions to improve your web site, selling strategy or pitch to the all-important end user.  Then, help spread the word about Valuate.com.

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As more and more people flock to the internet for business and/or pleasure, domain names continue to increase in worth as valuable online real estate assets.  Domain investors who got into the industry in the mid to late ’90s were able to register and then sell extremely valuable names that defined entire industries and categories (some examples are bodybuilding.com, cars.com, basketweaving.com).

Today these types of generic, geographic and category defining names are selling for hundreds of thousands – and even millions – of dollars.  These names will not  be readily available to hand register but, if they are available for sale, can be acquired if you’re ready to make the investment in your business, product or brand.

For people who are looking to purchase a domain name that reflects their name, project, web application, business or brand, there are millions of names that are (still) readily available and for sale at major domain registrars such as Go Daddy, Domain.com and Rebel.com.

If I could say one thing to anyone, any artist, any crafter, any ventriloquist, any business that’s new to the internet or new to doing business on the internet, PLEASE: buy or obtain the .com extension of your personal or professional name, your product name, your project name, your brand name, your business name before or soon after you set up shop online.

Your presence on the web is unique to you and you increase your chances of being found by other people looking for you, your products or your services in the major search engines.  Secure your domain name (preferably .com) today!

* On the left sidebar you will find additional links to articles that show you what to keep in mind when choosing domain names.

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