15 Years of Domain Name Investing Knowledge in 15 Mins

Welcome to the Kerner office. So if you're just now joining us, I've started about 75 businesses over the last 15 years and there's been a common thread in all 75 of those businesses. Domain names. Domain name buying is an art, not a science. And this video will show you the art of domain name buying. Investing, holding, flipping, you name it. Everything I know about making money with domain names I'm going to share in this video. So stick around. I'm first going to focus on the auction side of things. How to find undervalued niche domain names, how to that are expiring or that are already expired or that are ignored or that cost pennies on the dollar. And then I'm going to focus on all the different ways of making money with domain names. Hopping on viral trends, hopping on macro trends, hopping on misspellings of your website, hopping on misspellings of your competitor's website, hopping on misspellings of other websites. I own the domain name chag GPT.com I bought it right when ChatGPT came out. Guess what? It gets traffic. I'm going to teach you how to do all those things at the end of this video. So let's get right to it. All right, this is Dynadot. Dyna Dot is my go to resource for buying domain names, looking at domain names on auction, learning about domain name investing and everything. So let's get right to it. We're going to click on aftermarket expired auctions. Okay, so here's where it gets important. We want to set the right filters to find domain names that have the highest potential value. Now keep in mind, not all domain names have the same value to different people. So the person who owned koreandictionary.net might have moved on from that project, but you might be starting a different project having to do with Korean dictionaries that is a lot more promising. So stop asking yourself, oh, if this is so valuable, why is he letting it go? Well, because you don't know their, his or her situation. For instance, this domain name right here says Radio Fun. That could have been a blog about radios with very, very low upside, low ceiling. You might love this domain name because you have an idea to host radio meetups for ham radio enthusiasts. And you know that ham radio enthusiasts on average have a much higher net worth than the JO general population and that they spend $3,000 a year on ham radio equipment. And you know that you could monetize this site better than anyone else. Okay, this is a perfect example. So don't look at these through the filter of this isn't very valuable because someone's letting it go. No no no. What are you going to do with it? I'm going to help give you those ideas. Okay, before we even set filters, let's talk best practices. Generally speaking, dot com is better than any other TLD ending.com was first it's what we know. We're comfortable with it. Especially older generations are not comfortable going to non dotcom websites.IO.net, org those serve a purpose. Let me be clear. But if you can snag the dot com then go for the dot com. There are other use cases where a bio or a me make perfect sense. If you're buying your first and last name, me is great. If you're just going to link to something on social media, it doesn't matter as much. But if people will be typing in your website directly into the browser, which more people do than you might think. You want to make it short, memorable, easy to spell. Rhyming is great when possible. Dot com whenever possible. No dashes. Don't try to get cute. Don't make it super long. Keep it simple. Also, don't forget about syllables. A domain name might be really long but have fewer syllables. Or it might be short with a lot of syllables. Facebook.com two syllables, one less than thefacebook.com it's cleaner. You might own a four letter domain name with two W's. Wwjd.com ignore the fact that that's a common acronym because that would make that domain name very valuable. What makes it less valuable is the fact that it's wwjd.com eight syllables in only four letters. So the number of letters isn't everything. The number of words isn't everything. The number of syllables isn't everything. The domain name ending isn't everything. But all of these in context really make a difference. Also, this might sound obvious but make your name and or your domain name something that says what you do. Facebook that was a thing in college. It was like a yearbook. I had a company that shipped food sendeats.com I had a company that fixed phones. Phonerestore.com I have a tree care business. Fasttreecare.com I owned a business that made fast shipping software speed to ship.com when possible. Don't incorporate your first name into the business. That's generally not optimized. But ironically if you're a big business, it is optimized because it makes you look smaller than you actually are. But you don't know if you're going to get big yet. So let's mitigate the risk as much as possible. Okay, with all that in mind, let's start shopping for domain names. Names. I'm going to be very careful to set some filters here. I want no more than 10 characters. Okay? 10 characters. I want to look at dotcoms only. To start, let's talk about domain name age. This is very, very, very important because Google wants to know that your domain name is credible, it's relevant and it has authority. So if it was registered yesterday, it doesn't have any of those things yet, and that's okay. But if you're buying an existing domain name, older is always better. So let's go for five plus years old and that's it. I don't want to set too many filters because I don't want to sell myself short. All right, let's just look at some of these domain names. I didn't do any prep beforehand and just start ideating. Hpum.com that's a four letter domain name. Those can be valuable, but it doesn't mean that it is valuable. I've seen four letter domain names sell for 50 or $40. But if it's the right four letters, if you've got some vowels in there, some commonly used consonants like str, or it could be the acronym for a big company, it could be a very valuable domain name. Spain's news.com that could be interesting. It's both two words and two syllables. And Spain has what, 50, 60, 100 million people in it? But more importantly, this is what makes domains like these valuable. Backlinks. Look at this. 262,000 backlinks and five years old. Here's why that's important. There's two types of backlinks, inbound links and backlinks. An inbound link specifically refers to the direction of the traffic of a link to a site inbound versus outbound. If I have links on my website leading to someone else's, that's an outbound link. But backlinks are a little bit different than inbound links. Backlinks refer to one website linking to another in the context of SEO search engine optimization. So here on Dynadot, you'll see some of the auction pages list off links. Sometimes it says backlinks, sometimes it calls them inbound links. And this is a very important distinction that I haven't seen other websites do. This is one of the main reasons I use Dynadot here. In this context, links is referring to backlinks, which is the best type of links. A backlink is basically a five star review. A backlink means some other website out there is giving their blessing to your website, saying, this is not a scam, this is legit. When you click on Dogs for Sale, you're going to see Dogs for Sale. You're not going to see something else. You're going to get what you expect and not a bait and switch. But not all backlinks are created equal. If I go by Chrisestupidblog.com and start linking to other websites, my website has no domain authority, which means that my backlinks are worth almost nothing. So more backlinks are better than less, but you want as many them to be from websites that have a strong domain authority and that's scored from 1 to 100. And you can use other websites to check what the domain authority is of a website. But right off the bat, it makes sense to me that Spain's news.com would have hundreds of thousands of backlinks because it used to be a news site and it's going up for auction. This could be an amazing opportunity. You could use AI to summarize Spanish news articles and auto publish them. One a day, five a day, 100 a day. You could have thousands of landing pages, one for each of the cities in Spain. See, that's why I love domain name buying, flipping, investing, holding, being a degenerate. Short, but it's three syllables, but it's fairly easy to spell. 19 years old, 88 backlinks. Now, the dine appraisal is pretty accurate, but it doesn't mean that's what it's going to sell for. So don't let the dine appraisal discourage you from bidding or buying something, because I have seen domains sell in these auctions for 99% less than what the dine appraisal was. So basically, just shut this off from your mind and bid on what you think you could monetize the best. All right, let's go up here and look at some other offerings in their aftermarket section. First, first of all, they have an investing guide. That's incredible. Thousands and thousands of words. I've read most of these, so it's a good place to start. But let's go to the expired closeout section. One of my favorites. This is not an auction. These are websites that nobody wanted and they sell for as little as $5. You could go to any other website, any other competitor, to Dynadot, and you'd have to pay 10 to $20 for these. Just because no one wanted these doesn't mean you don't. It means it didn't fit their project. It wasn't worth them paying for every year. So let's do some more filtering and see if there's anything interesting here. We'll do five years old, minimum, no more than 10 characters. Fact, let's limit it to six characters and not limit it to dot com because there is value in the non.com URLs. 5 year old minimum, 6 character count maximum any TLD, not just dot com. All right, now we're going to go to a different tab of Dynadot and we're going to go to the expired closeout section. I love this section because I'm a cheapo and these are domain names that no one registered, no one bid on, no one wanted, but they still might have value to you and your project. So most of these domain names cost $5. And if I were to go to any other competing website to Dynadot, they would cost 12 to $20. So you can set up the same filters here. You can, you can look by TLDs, by the age, by the character count and you won't have to compete with anyone because these are buy now and not an auction. All right, so now I'm going to show you some domain names I own and I'm going to peel back the curtain into my brain. You might need to close your eyes a little bit, but I'm going to tell you what I was thinking when I bought these, what my strategy is with them and how you can shamelessly reverse engineer copy my strategies to make some money for yourself. But before I get there, I did want to give one more plug to Dynadot, the manager email. You can build your website with the drag and drop editor. You can buy domains, buy from auction, sell your domains, learn about domain name investing. Most of the other websites out there only do one or two of these things, but Dyna Dot has it all in one place. So good job Dynadot. Also, before I forget, you can also use it for domain appraisal. If you have a domain name anywhere, you can find out what it's worth. And their suggestion tool is really cool. Let's say I want to start a piano moving company, right? Piano moving. Oh, looks like the dot com is not available, but it suggests other ways you could change the domain to find one that is available. Super cool. All right, now to the last section. All right. I own about 130 domain names right now, and I took a small fraction of them. I pasted them over here, and I categorized some of the domain names that I found interesting so I can tell you what I'm thinking. Here's four domain names I own, and I put these in the oopsies redirect category. Animalaftercare.com was $3,000, and we generate leads for pet cremation businesses. But I didn't know if this business would work. So I started by buying animal-aftercare.com I broke my own rule by buying a domain name with a dash in it because I was just trying to validate an idea. So premium domain names are super worthwhile. If you go to open an ice cream shop, you're going to want to open in best corner in town. That's obvious. But why wouldn't you want a better domain name for your online business? Especially when 15% of web traffic comes from people just typing in things directly into the Google browser. Not Google Search, but into your Chrome browser. My friend Peter owns VidaliaOnions.com and a ton of his traffic slash income comes from people typing that indirectly, not even knowing that he existed beforehand. That's his whole strategy. And I have an interview with him. Animal-aftercare.com was $12. We proved it out. It worked. And then I reached out to the owner of animal aftercare.com through dyna. And negotiated it down to $3,000. Now we have a thriving business there, Texas snacks.com the CKS was not available right off the bat. I couldn't even find the owner. So we bought the X. We proved the domain name. A year or two later, I found the owner and I paid $1,500. Because if someone's talking to someone at church or out and about and they say, oh, you got to check out texas snacks.com they're not going to tell them with an X. They're going to type in this one directly. And this automatically directs to the X. Now, viral trends. So I was on Twitter once, and Andrew Taint was trending. Millions of views, millions of impressions. So me being an opportunist and kind of a degenerate, went to dyna dot, typed in andrewtate.com and it was open. Ten bucks. So I bought it. Have I done anything with it? No. Will I let it expire? Maybe I just want to own it. It's an asymmetric bet. Also, I saw a post go viral. Tens of millions of views. It was a picture of a toilet in the shape of a skeleton head. And the caption was babe, what's wrong? You haven't even used your skeletoilet today. But these can actually be bought. There's a company that sells skeleton shaped toilets and they didn't own skeletoilet or skeletoilets.com so I bought them. What am I going to do with it? Nothing. But what I could do with it is just put up a bunch of content about toilets or unique toilets or Halloween themed toilets or seasonal themed toilets and I could link to all the manufacturers and make an affiliate fee for every one of them. This could be a business today. And it's just sitting in my Dynadot account. Doomsdayinabox.com an influencer posted. Man, I really want to buy survival gear and food storage but it's such a mess to find it all from one place. I wish I could just click a button and buy it. Hmm. So I went to Dynadot and bought Doomsday in a box dot com. Never did anything with it. Okay, these are my why not domains? One word domain names are very valuable even if they're not a dot com. So one day I was just searching and I found these two stupid one word domain names co and I bought them and I never did anything because I think they're worth more than what I paid for them and I'm going to sit on them for a while. I used to own the domain name doortomore.com for some other project I can't even remember. Never did anything with it. Someone came knocking on my door, offered me $100 for it and I thought how about 1500? We went back and forth and I sold it for 750 bucks and that paid for my whole domain name addiction for that month. Buy domain names to protect yourself and your name. Your initial me co dot com. Buy as many as you can. Fun fact. I got scammed by a guy and he did not own his own domain name. So I built a website on his name's domain name with the entire dossier of everything I found out about him as a scammer. And I promise you this is I'm not lying. Years later when he finally got caught, the FBI reached out to me and they told me they referred to my website for some of their evidence. That is not a joke. Just in case. I tweeted once about what I coined the ten Alaga Triangle. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia. From Atlanta to Chattanooga to Birmingham. I said was going to be a real estate hotbed. And the tweet went viral. So I thought, huh, I wonder if the phrase 10 elaga this is really dumb. I know. I'm embarrassed. Okay? It sounds really stupid when I say it, but the Texas triangle is a thing, right? So I was trying to make it a thing over in the Southeast and so I thought, hey, it's kind of like a $10 copyright that you can buy in 30 seconds. So I just bought it. Common misspellings chag GPT.com One of the competitors for one of my businesses was called Minor Depot. Depot spelled with a t. And I thought a lot of people are going to misspell that. I heard a podcast about a guy with a mattress business that bought up hundreds of misspellings of his competitors and it drove millions of dollars to his business. Nobody does this. Nobody is doing this. You need to be doing it. These are kind of dumb. Goats as pets chase shiny objects.com pick up pianos Liquid Adderall don't ask. These are all projects that I have planned in the future. If you want to open a gym in Rexburg, Idaho, you're going to have to go through me first, because Flexburg is the best name for that gym. And then macro Trends When ChatGPT came out, everyone was talking about LangChain and LLMs and I thought, huh, that's going to be ubiquitous like JavaScript or C. So I bought these two domain names. Meme Genres Plastic and Blood. We're all worried about microplastics. Never touch plastic. Scalpcare.org Scalp care is a trending topic on Google Trends. Seed Oils everyone's worried about seed oils. Organ meat Organ meat is going up in popularity. So look for these trends. You can use Google Trends for it and buy domain names around them. I hope you learned something here. Hit me with a like and a share and or comment. And most importantly, check out Dynadot for all your domain name needs. They support me, so I support them. You will not be disappointed.