Do a bit of research on your cities of choice

[Olney]

I'd advice a lot of you who have the combo bug to really try to do a bit of research on the cities of choice before continuing with this new trend of City+Term+dot+com

Not every city or even state for that matter is a vacation or hotel hotspot.
Even some of the Japanese prefectures people only go there to visit back home. I'm assuming it's the same in China.

I don't like commenting in people's sales threads but some of these combos just don't go.

It's literally going to get to the point where you guys are going to start picking up things like

bursburyhotel.com for Bursbury, Georgia & expecting someone to buy it for $1,000 & the closest thing to a hotel is Jake & Zeek giving you a room in the back, near the stable.

Instead of spending $100 trying to go through small cities that won't be selling for a while, why not pick up a few good generics in .cn, .jp, or even .de?

A lot of us have made sales & to just spend it on registrations that will certainly take a while to get the fees back is a risk.

Many of you are just using the same cities, towns, etc. but knowing what is there can be a little helpful if you don't have a ton of investment funds. I would hate for registration time to come around & members start loosing their portfolios to drop catchers. Always keep in mind that IE7 is not official yet & expect to get real sales 1 or 2 years AFTER it is released.

Keep a simple plan. If times do really get tough make sure you have about 3 or 4 dot com generics that you certainly know can cover the registration of your entire portfolio. Don't put yourself in a risk factor, by getting too many too quick...

I had a look in NP about the nintendo wii domains. Probably 95% of those registered domains won't sell, & the ones that do probably will go cheap. Before people starting showing off combos what areas were you diving into? I'd continue in those routes. I'm still discovering new ways to find good buys that seem not to be even discussed on here. Trends are good but keep your portfolio tight full of good regs.

[domainguru]

Sound advice, which actually, this relates to your previous thread:

http://www.idnforums.com/forums/3242-do-you-think-that-idning-is-a-different-from-domaining.html

It *is* starting to look like 1999/2000 all over again, with too many people regging too many names in a "must get everything now" buying frenzy.

I know most people in this forum are experienced domainers, and have cashflow / experience to back them up, but for anyone relatively new to domaining, my advice is always think before regging a domain, and don't just pour money into registrations because of the latest regging trend. Otherwise you will end up with hundreds of domains you can't afford to renew in a year's time, and more to the point, can't even remember why you regged in the first place.

Think before you reg!

[thegenius1]

I'd advice a lot of you who have the combo bug to really try to do a bit of research on the cities of choice before continuing with this new trend of City+Term+dot+com

Not every city or even state for that matter is a vacation or hotel hotspot.
Even some of the Japanese prefectures people only go there to visit back home. I'm assuming it's the same in China.


Man you hit this right on the Nose! It reminds me of a conversation i had with my Japanese Coder about some Hotel names i tailgated from you , He was very excited about 沖縄ホテル.net Okinawahotel.net surprisingly more then 横浜ホテル.net Yokohamahotel.net because of the fact that Okinawa is a Major tourist destination .... if you check out Overture it is consistent with proving this , For instance for City Combo with Rental Car 沖縄レンタカー 27,526 alot more then the others. Granted companies will still want the name because im sure there are rental car places in almost every city but this supports what you are saying. And i was playing with some other combos early on when i started buying city combos and picked up 東京温泉.com TokyoHotSprings.com , 大分温泉.com OshiHotSprings.com Oshi isnt the biggest place by population or anything like that but with research you find out it Gets over 2 million visitors a year bused in to its Hotsprings . So it is defintly wise to research places before you go haywire. And to give another example i picked up 東京ゴルフ.com TokyoGolf.com and after asking my Japanese Coder about it he stated well there are really only Indoor Golfing in Tokyo , so basically there is a better place out ther for that combo.


When i first started picking up combo's I figuired i would touch some " generic keywords" that wouldnt face that issue ie's :

東京ブログ.com TokyoBlog.com
大阪ブログ.com OsakaBlog.com
東京チャット.com TokyoChat.com
大阪チャット.com OsakaChat.com
東京出会.com TokyoDating.com
大阪出会.com OsakaDating.com
東京ゴルフ.com TokyoGolf.com
大阪ゴルフ.com OsakaGolf.com
東京パチンコ.com TokyoPachinko.com
大阪パチンコ.com OksakaPachinko.com
東京カラオケ.com TokyoKaraoke.com
大阪カラオケ.com OksakaKaraoke.com
東京温泉.com TokyoHotSprings.com
大分温泉.com OshiHotSprings.com
東京遊園地.com TokyoAmusementPark.com
大阪遊園地.com OsakaAmusementPark.com
東京アニメ.com TokyoAnime.com
東京ラジオ.com TokyoRadio.com

All Inspired By this post :


I have more or less packed it in now. Had a recent spurt with Combos.

Came to the conclusion that it pointless making a search enquiry for some Services without specify a Geographic Location.

This led me to look at terms such as "Shanghai Hotel", which we already had a version of. It was becoming very obvious that advertisers were prepared to pay heavily for such combos and therefore the domains themselves will have a good value later. Other services that are fairly meaningless without a location are Real Estate, Dating, Employment Agencies etc. I just took a large list of Japanese Prefectures and Chinese Cities and started matrixing the terms. Got caught out on Chinese though. I had no idea there were so many different terms for Hotel!

Funny enough Sedo were advocating such an approach in their recent news letter:

<<<ou've heard of "Think globally, act locally"? Well, in this issue Sedo presents you with the domainer's version of this mantra: "think global (keywords), register local (domains)". The formula of combining high-value keywords (such as "mortgage", "real estate", "attorney", etc.) with local identifiers to form domains like BostonMortgage.com, HoustonRealEstate.info, or NewYorkAttorneys.net is rapidly becoming one of the hottest strategies for building a search keyword-oriented portfolio that will perform extremely well on ppc monetization services like SedoParking.com.

The appeal of this strategy lies not just in the fact that locally-targeted domains are more likely to be available, but also in new research which suggests that some locally-targeted keywords actually pay considerably more per click than the nationally-targeted version. As more and more small businesses discover the value of local search, we expect the premium on locally-targeted keywords to rise further.

For more tips on how you can take advantage of this hot new investing strategy before all the good domains are gone, see this month's feature article "Domaining Goes Local" by Jude Augusta, Sedo's Director of Partnerships.

Wishing you continued success,


Sincerely,

Matt Bentley
CSO, Sedo.com>>>

As ever they are exactly correct, just several years late. Interestingly they never thought that their clever localisation strategy might be link to IDN in anyway!


Yeah Dave's right on this.
I just picked up 50 new dot com combos today...
After finding out Dave took ones that I've been meaning to pick up but never had the time to look for.

ALSO This Statement Makes Perfect Sense !

Dave is right I've also been writing about buying in themes. There's only one hotel in Japanese Actually 2 Hotel.com & Hotel.net they won't let you register the dot jp.

That might sell for $500,000
But if you have 20 hotspots & hotel in jp & com selling at $50,000 to $75,000 each, who's going to make out better & who's going to get a quicker sale?


Domaining Goes Local Article

http://www.contributed.domainingblog.com/2006/04/domaining-goes-local.html

[Rubber Duck]

Well, I guess I am at least partially reponsible for this trend, although I never advociated anything below prefecture level for Japan.

There are two key point to this. Only reg term that are getting significant bids on the major cities or prefectures. It may be acceptable to extrapolate a bit, but not too far.

Try to make sure you have the correct term in the first place. If the Tokyos and Osakas have already gone, then Whois them to check which idiot has regged them. If Whois details Japanese, you should be alright to extrapolate a bit. If them are New Yorks or LA, then exercise a bit more caution.

[touchring]

I had a look in NP about the nintendo wii domains. Probably 95% of those registered domains won't sell, & the ones that do probably will go cheap. Before people starting showing off combos what areas were you diving into? I'd continue in those routes. I'm still discovering new ways to find good buys that seem not to be even discussed on here. Trends are good but keep your portfolio tight full of good regs.


Yes, Olney is kind to provide hints.

I've bypassed the entire city+hotel/realestate craze, too busy with other registrations.

I did take a few major chinese city + realestate in March, but those were the only ones i thought worth taking. :)

[thegenius1]

If the Tokyos and Osakas have already gone, then Whois them to check which idiot has regged them. If Whois details Japanese, you should be alright to extrapolate a bit. If them are New Yorks or LA, then exercise a bit more caution.

Well there was a trick Olney Brought up on this forum a few months back , And it really told a good story , Just because the Tokyo's & Osakas maybe takn by a U.S address Now , At one point in Time they Were Not ;)

[Rubber Duck]

Well there was a trick Olney Brought up on this forum a few months back , And it really told a good story , Just because the Tokyo's & Osakas maybe takn by a U.S address Now , At one point in Time they Were Not ;)

You can only be fairly certain that a domain is worth money when somebody else has got it and cannot be induced to part with it!

We have literally hundreds of geographic combos. Personally, I am not unduely worried about renewal time. Most of them are due for 11 months, and I am reasonable confident that my portfolio will be self sustaining by then.

[thegenius1]

You can only be fairly certain that a domain is worth money when somebody else has got it and cannot be induced to part with it!


Not really sure what you are saying , but i know alot of people around these kneck of the woods that picked up drop's that people would die for , IE Nagasaki that alph got from Touchring was a Drop , the owner has no clue whats going on in the world of IDN's just like a few people i phoned to buy there domains

I can tell you this much , when a named was/is bought by a Japanese person Dot Com & Net , they knew/know something about something

[IDNCowboy]

Not really sure what you are saying , but i know alot of people around these kneck of the woods that picked up drop's that people would die for , IE Nagasaki that alph got from Touchring was a Drop , the owner has no clue whats going on in the word of IDN's just like a few people i phoned to buy there domains

I can tell you this much , when a named was/is bought by a Japanese person Dot Com & Net , they knew something about something
the big city + hotels were taken a long time ago :(

I was lucky my tokyohotels.jp and osakahotels.jp were available when i picked them up :)