Buy International Domain Names
For those of you out of the loop of buying and reselling domains, let me give you a quick introduction. Back in the 90’s there was a huge rush to buy domain names. Domainers would basically use sophisticated programs to buy domains, and then sell them to companies. They also bought typo domains (‘ebye.com’ instead of ebay). Much of that still goes on today.
Now, people are still buying every domain imaginable and buying expired domains. That’s nothing new and I think it’s pretty difficult to make any serious money unless you are pretty sophisticated and really get involved with understanding the expiring domain process.
If you’re curious, you can do some searches on ebay, dnforum.com, afternic.com , and plenty of others. Those are the guys trying to make a living buying and reselling traditional .com, .net, .org domains (and some others like .biz and .info).
So buying and reselling domains is nothing new. However, what I’m talking about is relatively new. The process involves registering Internationalized domain names. IDN’s usually contain non-ASCII characters - meaning, characters from another language. ICANN, the organization which oversee’s domain names, introduced a system to convert these foreign character names into their ASCII equivalent. So for example, you would use Babel Fish to translate from English to German, or from English to Arabic, etc. Once you find the German or Arabic language equivalent of the word, you would then convert it to ‘Punycode’ using an IDN Conversion Tool . So صنعاء.com becomes xn--ggbl5bq8d.com. You can now check to see if this domain is registered. If it is, then you can buy it. I think you would be surprised to see how many common 1-word domain names are still available. I would say in 3-6 months, most of those single word names will be gone. So there’s a pretty large opportunity to invest in IDN’s and then sell them immediately, or better, waiting a few years.
Ok, so why is this a money making idea? All the guy’s who bought domains in the 90’s have jumped into buying IDN domains. This is basically the second domain gold rush. Realize that most of the world speaks a language other than English. So the Japanese language equivalent for ‘hotels.com’ is pretty valuable to a hotel developer who doesn’t own the *.co.jp second level domain.
Download a free trial version of the IDN Research Tool . The software allows you to automate all that I mentioned above to find IDN’s as well as regular .com, .net., .org. The functionality/flexibility is the best I’ve seen on the market and it also offers loading of a proxy list, and checks the domain against Overture search queries so you can see if there are any searches for your domain. It also reports back if that domain has any Google, MSN or Yahoo links and also gives you the Alexa ranking. Pretty nifty.
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