Ali Zandi took some time to explain his recent strategy for hand registrations. In the very popular available domains thread, Ali lists which names he picked up from Bill Eisenmann’s lists.
Ali went of topic a tad to detail how he picked up 4600 .com names during a Fasthosts promotion for cheap .coms.
I reg’d around 4,600 names ~60 days ago and added them all to Afternic. Made 50% my investment back already.
With Afternic – the domain names get shown directly in the registrar path. Which is the most important thing to note. A lot of these types of endusers only know of GoDaddy, so they head over and start typing names in to see if they are available. Having them at Afternic allows that to happen. So if they type in something like “Shorteo” (another domain Bill listed) this is what they’ll see:
That is why I use Afternic for these types of names. As they are usually impulse buys from someone constantly seeing that a domain they like isn’t available and when they see one that is – they get excited and move forward.
There is no big “secret” to how it’s done. The only thing that separates names that have a higher chance of selling and those that won’t is research and data driven registrations. The internet is filled with data and there are numerous creative ways to extract it to build your own system of registering domains with certain metrics that have proven to have a higher chance of selling.
Why 4,600? Because that’s as many as I could register before the FastHost promo ended
I only work this method for these types of names. For my long term names, I do it differently.
When asked how long it took to compile his list ? Ali replied:
Haha! Actually spent ~200 hours obtaining/sorting data, creating permutations and scouring deleted names lists and created a list of ~5M domains that are were available (had bulk availability checker developed)… then sorted those by certain metrics, picked the best ones and reg’d as many as possible each day (since FH only allowed 50 reg’s at at time) till the promotion ended. I also reg’d a lot of the daily deleted names along side the list I made.
5 million names is a big list, thanks to Ali for sharing his research methodology.