Potential goldmine and one benefit of being a programmer
My background is in programming and when I have ideas, its extremely easy to sit down, start programming to find data, analyse data or do “something” without having to write a brief and get a programmer to do it for you - and saves on the cost too.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been extending my portfolio of domain names and the chance of registering a good domain name is quite rare as millions of domains (even .UK domains) have already been registered. LLL or three letter domains are extremely scarce and even if they don’t make sense, e.g. UZK.com, then they can still go for money.
A lot of people reserve domain names, and loose interest or forget about them and when the domain comes up for expiry, they let it lapse and after a period of time, the domain gets deleted and is available to reserve again by anyone.
Existing domain names will have a history, potentially back-links from existing websites and other “factors” that can be of value to a new owner. They may want to quickly get traffic and start earning money from it (see my article on lots of sites earning £1 per day).
Some registrars (e.g. Network Solutions, Nominet) provide services that allow people with a technical background to programatically do the same as what you can do to check domain names but hundreds of times per minute.
I spent a few hours this weekend developing some program code that uses Sockets to look for available domain names (I’m being deliberately vague with some details as I don’t want to give away too many secrets), and after finding a dictonary of words, I was able to scan over 26,000 terms/words in just under 30 minutes and see whether the domains were already registered and give me a report on what was available to register. One word domains are often valuable and one of the ones I’ve just reserved is snogged.co.uk.
What I’m now able to do is to extend my little program to check for when existing domains expire and get deleted and then try and reserve those domains.. The technique is known as Drop Catching - effectively catching/reserving a domain as soon as its been dropped/deleted.
One problem I do have is not enough time to try all these things out, but with more domains being reserved each day, the number of good domains not already registered is diminishing fast and anything you can do to give yourself a headstart is got to be worth a try.
