Domain Shopper

How much is my website worth? – Using sedo to determine the value of a domain

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:40:12 +0000

Sedo is one of the most prolific domain brokering services around, allowing domain owners to auction off their domain names to buyers from all around the world.

They act like any other traditional auction house and offer a number of services relating to the buying and selling of domains, appraisals of domain quality and cost, as well as other ancillary services such as domain parking.

When buying (or selling) a domain alone (i.e. without some associated business to go with it), it can be hard to gauge exactly how much the domain may be worth. This why sedo provide their domain appraisal service, taking your domain name, running through a bunch of tests on their servers and then finally coming up with a figure they think you should sell it for (generally via them).

This is all well and good, but they charge for this service and most people won't want or need to go this far, they'll just need a quick idea of the domain's value so they know they are charging or paying a fair price for it.

The easy way of finding this information out, is to do a keyword search on sedo's domain catalogue for your domain name. By looking at the results this search returns you should be able to find domains with similar names to yours and thereby get a good estimate of what your domain is worth by comparison.

Take this domain (domain-shopper.co.uk) for example. doing a keyword search on sedo for domain shopper gives these results and I can see that domainshoppers.com is on for $1788 USD and domain-shopper.com is on for $995 USD.

So, if this domain was a .com I'd expect it to fetch on average around $1400 USD. As it's a .co.uk I may reduce this by an arbitary 25% and thus expect it to fetch about $1000.

Easy huh?

If your search on sedo didn't return anything useful (or even if it did!) it may be worth trying the same search and comparison process on some of the other big domain auction houses such as those listed below.

Domain auction houses:

sedo
godaddy

No related posts.

Tools for researching new niches and business ideas on the internet

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:23:52 +0000

The starting point when researching new niches and potential business ideas on the internet is almost always the domain name of any existing similar websites.

You can generally determine some valuable information about a website by simply looking up the whois record for that website's domain name.

As you can see from the result for this page, the whois record itself is simply just a note about when the domain was registered, how long it is registered for, who owns the domain and the internet address of the server where the website's files are held. Though minimal, we can deduce certain things about a website's 'pedigree'.

A website has to serve a purpose, either commercially or informationally to be worth being kept online. Someone has to pay for the hosting and domain registration each year, so unless a website is serving a purpose there is little motivation for it being kept online.

So, the older the domain is, generally speaking, the longer current website at that domain has been running, and the better quality that website should be, and the better rankings it should have in the search engines as it's a good, established, source of information.

The length of time left before the domain's registration has expired is also important.

If someone has registered a domain for a long time, this represents a long term investment in that domain, and generally the website that resides at the end of it.

So if a domain has a long history and is registered for a long time into the future it can be presumed that it's going to hold some quality content.

The next main thing that is generally useful is the registrant information i.e. who bought this domain?

A company, an indvidual and what may they be using it for - to provide information, or something with a more commercial angle?

If it's a company you can (at least in the UK) do a search on the companies house website for that company, determine to an extent how much it makes from its tax records and in some cases asertain something about how much that domain may be worth to the company.

There are many whois services out there, some of the best known ones being:

Network Solutions

That's the basics derived from a standard whois record, but you can determine even more about a domain from the history of its whois record.

This is where whois monitoring tools such as those provided mainly for free from domaintools.com come into play. You can see this site's details on domain tools by clicking here

Domain tools will show you all kinds of useful historical things about a domain, such as its who is and name server history which basically relates to how many times the domain has moved in the past and therefore how many times it's changed hands over the years.

Like anything, a domain with one careful owner is probably going be 'better' or more 'reliable' than one that's been transferred all over the internet.

There are many other things domaintools.com can offer and are adding to their service all the time, so I won't go into any more detail right now other than to suggest you check it out for yourself.

Overall I think I would have to recommend domaintools.com as THE best domain research tool currenly availible. Couple this with data from SEDO, the waybackwhen machine and now Google trends and you have a very powerful toolkit for domain and niche online business research.

No related posts.