Essential Domainer Tools
Part 1: Basics Keyword Tools
These keyword tools have been the meat and potatoes of domainers well before the web2.0 boom and continue to be important references for any serious domain buyer or seller as they give indications of the advertising demands of different niches, traffic potential and ideas for related keywords to any term.
During the first wave of mass domain aquisition in the 90s these tools were used to find the best paying keywords.com and resulted in pretty profits for some and hundreds of parked domains for others as they wait for these bland keyword brands to be in demand. The savvy web2.0 domainer will find use in these tools in finding popular niches, brainstorming related terms and gleaning ideas of where they may apply their 2.0 creativity.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool – This indispensable tool will give you a peek at Googles extensive database of keyword searches for any term giving you an idea of the commercial value of a keyword, aproximately how often it is searched and other keywords that are related to it.
Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool – shows combined results from two of the most popular keyword search tracking services, Wordtracker and Overture. These tools will tell you approximately how many times a keyword is searched for in a day and also how many times related keywords are searched. A great source for finding sub-niches of interest.
AddMe.com Keyword Suggester – enter your term and find how many people are searching for it and other similar searches. Basic keywords queried from the more advanced www.keyworddiscovery.com pay service.
Parts 2: Trend Tools
Is your concept hot or not? These tools can help you spot an up and coming meme or warn you if its time to jump a sinking social network.
Google Trends – see what big brother has to say about if your search terms are rising like the sun, holdin’ steady or falling to obscurity with a look at search trends over the past few years. Web2.0, tech and pop culture terms can be passing fads or long term movements and Google trends can help you see where things are going. Check out the Hot Trends for the latest daily buzz.
AOL Hot Searches features the top 10 AOL searches every day plus interesting features on the top searchs in different categories from unusual pets to cosmetic surgery procedures.
Ask IQ doesn’t dig very deep but does give a snapshot of mainstream USA with the top Ask.com searches of the week, news searches and movie searches. Not much interesting here, far from the cutting edge but its sometimes good to know where middle America is at.
The Lycos 50 is another pop culture oriented weekly list of the topics hot with Lycos search users. Doesn’t stray far from entertainment or sports items.
Web2.0 Tools
Enough with the old school, aside from Google’s useful trend tool the other lists above from AOL, Ask and Lycos with their boring mainstream stories clearly show the weakness of the old school to provide relevant, up to the second content. Let us now look to the effective web2.0 tools that have slain these mighty giants.
Web2.0 Trend Tools
The interactive connected nature of web2.0 now provides channels for many more layers of information gathered and distributed through social, human edited networks providing personalized, quality content on demand that is unfiltered by layers of bureaucracy and clumsy algorithms.
Popular web2.0 sites for the latest info on news, entertainment, technology and more include digg.com, del.icio.us, reddit and metafilter. These cutting edge sites are a great source for Web2.0 buzz on cutting edge sites, interesting mashups and online trends from the trendmakers.
PopUrls.com is a great starting point to find the network with the information you are looking for. This site provides a live list of the top headlines from a dozen of the most popular web2.0 social bookmarking and community sites including the ones mentioned above.
Web2.0 Domainer Tools
This is where things get fun with unconventional tools to hack, mash and discover cool web2.0 domain names that traditional domainers will never find. Subscribe by RSS now so you don’t miss the indepth followups of how to maximize these tool’s potential.
Word Tools
The More Words tool was made for players of games like scrabble but is also a great tool for web2.0 domain name hacking using subdomains or extensions. For example if hacking the .us tld looking for a name such as delicio.us the Word Tools site could be used to find any words ending in ‘us’ with the use of an asterisk like this *us. For subdomains I used this tool to find o.ddity.com also contained qui.ddity.com.
Here is a summary of the search capabilities:
Use a hyphen (dash) to give the location of a missing letter: w-rd or -are
Use an asterisk (star) for any number of unknown letters: lett* or *gry or ar*ct
Exclude words containing the letters that follow a caret (hat): ma-e ^kt
Or enter a few letters (without hyphens or asterisks) to see if they make any words.
Word Navigator offers a similar service with a nicer interface.
Use question marks for missing letters (one “?” – one letter): cap?tal or cap??a?
Use an asterisk for ANY number of unknown letters:navigat* or *zzle or cr*word
Exclude words containing the letters that follow a hyphen (dash): p??zle -wdxu
Word Navigator also offers some possibly useful word lists:
All words, By Length, Letter Mix, All Unique Letter
