IDN Research Tool Blog

I just launched a new website that compares various keyword research tools. These tools are helpful if you are setting up your pay per click campaigns and want to find good keywords to add to your campaign.

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I recently came upon the conference notes for the Global Symposlium on Promoting the Multilingual Internet, held in Geneva May 9-11, 2006.

Sessions include:

• Standards & technical Issues

• IDN operational experience showcase

• Scripting operational experiences

• Domain Name Registries Perspective

• Developing and promotion of local content over internet

• Advancing the Deployment of IDN

• Hardware & Software for Multilingual Internet

• Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet

• Thematic Session on Multilingualism in Practice

• Conclusion & Recommendations

Index of topics.

Abstracts / Lecture Notes.

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I’ve posted a 4-minute tutorial on how to use a Chinese word list, SC-Unipad, and the Domain Research Tool to quickly find available IDN domains.

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Google and other search engines aren’t too keen on having a bunch of domain spammers continually query their database. (Who you calling a domain spammer?!) So when you load a dictionary list of 100,000 words into the domain research tool and all of a sudden the servers are timing out, and nothing is working properly, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For this reason, I will help everyone out and give you guys a free, fresh, daily proxy list. Mmmm, tasty!

To load the proxy list into DRT:  1) Save the proxy list as a .txt file.  2) Open DRT & go to Options -> Scan Settings 3) Click ‘Proxy Settings’ 4) Click the ‘Proxy Servers’ tab 5) Click ‘Load’ then browse to the proxy list txt file 6) Click ‘Verify Proxy’

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One of the constant problems many domainers face is properly working with non-ascii characters in the Windows environment. A quick and simple solution to this problem is the SC-UniPad tool. The software correctly displays more than 300 foreign languages and 54,000 Unicode characters.

You can import your foreign word lists into SC-Unipad and then easily copy them over to the IDN Research Tool to check if the domain is available, overture word count, and other information about the IDN domain.

The free trial version of Unipad works well. However, unless you purchase it ($199), it will occasionally ask you to close and reopen the program.

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Word Lists

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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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Read my previous post first if you haven’t already. Basically, the technique that I outline in the last post is similar to this one, but this time, you are looking for domains which can be easily optimized for SEO and has a significant Overture search count.

How does this work? Google and other search engines have a tendency to put the .com domain name which contains the exact users search query as first on the search results page. So for instance, you go to Google and type a search for ‘marketing tips’ - If marketingtips.com contains the same topical relevancy and has several inbound links, Google will most likely rank it in the first position.

Using the Domain Research Tool, you can quickly find domains that are expired and available for you to register. It immediately gives the Overture search count for expired domains, which is a very rough estimate of how many people searched for that keyword phrase the previous month (note: it’s pretty inaccurate because it combines singular/plurars and is influenced by search marketers spamming it)…

For example, let’s say you find the domain name ‘televisionlistings.com’ is available – which has a Overture search count of 11,546. You would buy the domain and then figure out a way to monetize it. Now, here is where most domainers fail . They basically put up a page that shows a bunch of ads and hope someone types their domain in by accident or they just happen to rank for a term using natural SEO and then get a few clicks on their ads. Well, that’s the wrong way to go about monetizing the domain.

What you want to do is think of a business model around this domain. So think about what unique service you can provide to people who visit your site. What value can you add? What unique features can you offer? Can you fill a market need? You can easily rank #1 for this domain, so why blow it by making the site spam?

For this example, you might provide a simple Google style url box that asks the user to submit their zip code and then directs them to Yahoo’s television guide. On your home page, you might also publish RSS feeds on local entertainment news, Del.icio.us entertainment news, and daily youtube videos on fashion. You can now stick an Adsense ad on there. Not only will you probably achieve the #1 spot for “television listings” – you will also have built a site that has some value to visitors (in which case, they may return).

A variation of this method is first researching which affiliate you want to work with. I like the affiliate networks Link Share, Commission Junction, and Financial Affiliate Marketing. Sign up as an affiliate and then start by looking for affiliate programs in which you have an interest in or know a lot about. Once you’ve found the program, use the domain research tool and search for words/ word stems in that industry. Once you’ve found a nice domain that is available, you can now set up a nice business model around the affiliate site. This way it’s a bit easier to monetize the site instead of first searching for a domain then trying to make money off it.

Using the domain research tool in conjunction with a bit of SEO and a business mind, you will do well.

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