Here are some domains that are currently for sale in the lower price ranges. These are the asking prices at an auction.
Alright, let's get to work.
A domain is a collection of english letters that describes a specific address on the internet. The average person tends to think of these letters or words as websites, but technically speaking, a domain name like "domaintreasuremap.com" represents the english version of a specific address on the internet - much like your street address describes the location of your property. There may or may not be an active website at this address - just like you may have bought vacant property before you built a house on the property.
A domain name includes two parts; the unique letters before the period, and the "tld" (top level domain) letters after the period. There are hundreds of tld's, the most common one being ".com". Tld's that are a distant second in popularity include ".net", ".org", ".info", ".biz", and ".name". In addition, there are all of the country code tld's (commonly referred to as "cctld"), one for each country in the world. For example, ".ca" is the cctld for Canada, ".in" for India, ".eu" for Europe, etc..
There is only 1 unique domain name for every piece of property on the internet. Additional domain names may be "forwarded" to the same piece of property if the owner desires, but we'll get to this topic later.
Due to the existence of so many different tld's, there can be a large number of unique domain names using the very same words before the period. In other words, "domaintreasuremap.com" is a different domain than "domaintreasuremap.info". Each one is registered separately, and can be owned by different people. This can present obvious problems, especially if this group of letters or words represents an existing business with a recognized brand.
As a domain investor you will need to consider which tld's you value higher when looking for specific domain names. In many cases, domain names with the most common tld's will be valued higher. In other cases, a particular domain name will be registered with a specific country code tld for example, but some of the more common tld's for that name may still be available.
The domain landscape is continually evolving, and there is considerable discussion about the value of the various tld's. In general terms, .com domains are currently valued at approximately 10x the value of .net and .org, and all other tld's are valued significantly lower still. However, there are exceptions, especially when dealing with cctld's.
We're going to start by reviewing some of the fundamentals that you need to understand if you're going to invest in domains.
There are far too many people on the internet preaching that you need to make some cash as fast as you can so that you gain a sense of success and don't quit. I disagree. Like anything worth doing, it's worth doing well. Learning to play a musical instrument, learning to play a new sport, whatever it is, you are going to be much further ahead if you master the fundamentals first.
Of course, this is usually more difficult than jumping straight to "the fun stuff" and never really understanding the reasoning behind your decisions. If you think back to some of your teachers the ones that you respect the most in hindsight probably were real task masters at the time. You know the ones that you would curse under your breath every time they made you run the same drill over and over. But voila, years later you can still play the game better than many of your buds because you mastered the fundamentals.
Don't worry, we're not going to make you run drills over and over. That's up to you how much you practice and put the knowledge we're going to teach you into action. But, we are going to take some time up front and lay out the fundamentals properly. So, if you start to wonder "where's the beef", hang in there and follow along with the knowledge that when we're done you're going to be way ahead of 95% of the so-called domainers in the game today.
