Totally Tweriffic Twitter Trend Tool
Twitter has a gem of a domaining tool that no one knows about. This is something that’s not on their page: it’s hidden. It’s called Search.Twitter.com. The name is self explanatory.
So I did a search for “new trend” and it was quite obvious what trends people have been talking about. This is hitting up trends pretty early on. Twitter and texting is about the first thing people do when they communicate now-a-days. It’s usually too late to get the category killer domain names once a trend hits the news. But I hit one or two using this search engine.
This is what I found:
Apparently Christina Aguilera and Tyra Banks have started a new trendy hairstyle called Goffered Hair. I registered:
- Goffered.com
- GofferedHair.com
This is something I noticed myself during the Olympics but never really thought of it: lenseless glasses. I saw several tweets of this and one referred to this article. I registered:
- LenselessGlasses.com
A big trend right now is making an avatar of your manga self. You take your face and manga-ize it. I registered:
- MyMangaAvatar.com
- MyMangaSelf.com
- MangaSelf.com
Other weird trends I read about: Fish fighting, cats in purses, pre-tween beauty waxing, precycling, SIGG bottles, white hair, insourcing, large ariel font and short wedding dresses.
These are trends that I otherwise would never have found. I was able to hit them up super early before they got into mainstream media.
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Baby Boomers Will Trigger Many Trends
Boomer companions/caregivers where chosen as one of the top jobs of the near future, as chosen by MSNBC. They’re absolutely right. In fact, the Boomers will trigger several huge trends that have already begun to reveal themselves and will be in full swing just 2 years from now.
There are 78 million Boomers, and in the next couple years many of them will be turning 65, making them eligible for Medicare. 78 million! To give you an idea of how many people that is, it is the same amount that live in our three most populated states:
The Baby Boomers are going to begin retiring and hitting up that Medicare. Expect a surge in age-related illness/treatments such as Alzheimer’s and Diabetes in the next couple years. But is that really all that 78 million people can give us?
Hell no. You see, these people will be retiring and that will set in motion oodles of trends.
To start, someone must fill their positions at the workplace as Baby Boomers are one third of America’s workforce. This is something I pointed out in a post about Generation X. Gen X is set to take over. Know their tendencies, likes, dislikes, whatever.
Second, these people may be retiring from their careers, but some (actually, I think most… and so does CNN) will move on to an every-day job… either by necessity to pay the bills, by choice to fill the time, or to fulfill their lifelong dream of starting a business. You should see a boom in the following industries due to retired Boomers:
- Senior job placement and training services. To help them find a job they’ll be happy with.
- Volunteer and non-profit (especially the Peace Corps). Now that they have the time, many will volunteer it.
- Consultants. Many of these seniors will become consultants for the very field they retired from.
- Temp Agencies. Many people turn to them, and Boomers like them because it’s most likely how they started.
- Houseboats. Both sales and rentals. Boomers love them and can now actually spend time in them.
- RV’s. Oh this will be big. You heard it here first: I don’t care about the gas crisis, Boomers LOVE their RV’s. Boomers love to travel, and they’ll do it in an RV.
Third, Boomers are going to want to live in their dream home. The key is WHERE their dream home is located. Like I said: they love to travel, so Boomers have timeshares, second homes and favorite vacation spots all across the U.S. These are the places they will want to move to. So where are these?
In no particular order:
- Flagstaff, AZ
- Tucson, AZ
- Sedona, AZ
- Palm Springs, CA
- San Diego, CA
- Lake Tahoe, CA
- Aspen, CO
- Boulder, CO
- Tampa, FL
- Port St. Lucie, FL
- Sarasota, FL
- Key West, FL
- Orlando, FL
- Boca Raton, FL
- Fort Myers, FL
- Cape Cod, MA
- Santa Fe, NM
- Las Vegas, NV
- Reno, NV
- Myrtle Beach, SC
- Hilton Head Island, SC
- U.S. Virgin Islands
- Anywhere Hawaii
- OK, anywhere Florida
- The Caribbean
Boomers already own timeshares or second homes in these cities. I feel there will be a significant surge in population in most, if not all, of these cities/places over the next couple years as the Boomers move in permanently. They are already familiar with them and will want to spend their remaining days, and money, in the place that most makes them happy. Expect healthy real estate markets in these cities.
I’m sure there are plenty more trends as 78 million people are bound to produce many. Are there any you can see the Boomers setting off?
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CNN Money’s Top 100 Places To Live And Why Dickinson.com Sucks As A Geodomain
CNN Money has posted their top 100 best places to live in the U.S. This is an indispensable article for the geodomainer. Not only is it a wealth of information, CNN Money exposes and reinforces the trends to make them stronger.
How do they decide what the best places are? Affordable housing, leisure activities, cultural options, job growth, crime rate, sunniness and health care among others. A good set of qualities to judge a city on. Perhaps not perfect- I’m a stormy weather kind of fella, not sunny- but I think it’s in line with the common perception.
Lets take the top city: Middleton, Wisconsin. Obviously they’re doing something right to place at the top of the list. Even so, now that CNN Money has labeled them the best place to live, you can bet everything on their tourism and real estate industries increasing… by a lot. If you lived near the top city, wouldn’t you want to check it out if you haven’t already done so? I would.
The absolute best part is that these city’s .coms can most likely be acquired at bargain prices. I’m curious to see how much Dickinson.com will go for at Bido’s auction. One of the selling points I’ve seen for this domain is the size of the city Dickinson, Texas. I work just 10 miles from Dickinson, Texas and can tell you that you do NOT want to use this as a geodomain. The place is a hole. The entire area is a hole. I’ll take any of the below cities over Dickinson.com as a geodomain.
Stick with Dickinson as a surname.
Back to the list! You can sort towns in many different ways here. Want to buy a .com of a city with high household incomes? Not a problem. How about a geodomain that focuses on the health industry? Sort by health care access. This list is great!
Here are some great ways to sort this list:
- Top-earning towns
- Hottest towns
- Priciest homes
- Most singles
- Youngest
- Job growth
- Affordable housing
- Plentiful leisure activities
- Plentiful cultural options
- Sunny weather
- Short commute time
- Good health care access
- Skinniest
- Clean Air
And, here are the top 10 places to live in the U.S.:
- Middleton, Wisconsin
- Hanover, New Hampshire
- Louisville, Colorado
- Lake Mary, Florida
- Claremont, California
- Papillion, Nebraska
- Milton, Massachusetts
- Chaska, Minnesota
- Nether Providence, Pennsylvania
- Suwanee, Georgia
Want a geodomain that would be great for a social network for singles?
- State College, Pennsylvania
- Durham, New Hampshire
- Amherst Center, Massachusetts
- Storrs, Connecticut
- Oxford, Ohio
- Stanford, California
- East Lansing, Michigan
- Indiana, Pennsylvania
- Blacksburg, Virginia
- Geneseo, New York
Notice something? They’re all college towns. Stanford, Miami U, UConn, Penn State and Michigan State are great schools and would be perfect to focus a geodomain on.
If you’re a geodomainer, this is a great tool for informing yourself before you buy. Boomark it!
EDIT:
This is the 2007 list. You can find the 2008 list here. And here is the post explaining my blunder.
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How To Use Freshdrop.net To Find Domain Names Part 2: Geodomains
This is part 2 of my Freshdrop.net posts; you can view part 1 here. Today I want to focus on geodomains. Sure, this is trend domaining blog, but if you read my first post you’d remember that I’d also like to tackle geodomains.
You can’t deny the rising popularity of geodomains. The internet is going local and with the new extensions coming out in the next year or two, geodomains are here to stay. But you’ve already read this on all the other blogs.
This post will show you how Freshdrop.net is a goldmine for geodomains. Now, you’re not going to find any city.com’s or country.com’s here. But you will find some great geo+keyword.com’s and keyword+geo.com’s. Some of these are flippable to other domainers, but like any domain the real money is in selling to end-users.
We’ll use Houston as the main example in this post. Houston is the U.S.’s fourth largest city, so there are usually a good amount of related domains on these lists. Using the filter, I’m going to start with just .coms and eliminate the hyphens, numbers and typos. Here are the available domains in the Closeout section, sorted by age:
I’m going to sidetrack for a moment here. Note that the GR, GRN and OVTN columns are generally useless when looking for geodomains. The script simply has a hard time separating words I guess. The only two columns worth noting are age and traffic. Even traffic isn’t that big of deal since sites that get any real traffic don’t make it this far in the deletion cycle. I usually sort by age as good domains tend to be registered for longer.
Though there isn’t anything outstanding here, I do see a couple worth picking up:
- DirectHouston.com
- HoustonAdvice.com
- HoustonRefinances.com
- HoustonStudioRental.com
Like I said, no show stoppers. But these are almost flippable and certainly would do an end-user good if you are skilled in finding them.
Here is a search for .org, .net, .info, .tv and .us:
You’re not going to be able to flip these to another domainer all on their own. But plop on a mini-site and give it some time to get indexed and you could turn a decent profit using a few of these. Remember these are buy it now for $5 (plus reg fee). Small price to pay for the potential.
Moving on to Exp Names. This list is usually much larger, but has better domains. Remember that this is an auction, and bidding on these domains draws attention to them. Place your bid minutes before the auction ends.
Going back to .coms:
I wasn’t joking when I said that this list is usually longer. People tend to bid on decent domains, and the only domain on this list that has a bid is HoustonSurveyor.com. Rightfully so, as this is one of the better names on the list.
After that, I feel these domains may be worth picking up:
- LuxuryHoustonCondos.com
- HoustonHouseGuide.com
- TeachingHouston.com
- HoustonATM.com
- HoustonDieticians.com
And here is a search for .org, .net, .info, .tv and .us:
If you’re not afraid of the non-.com’s, then there are a few good ones here, starting at the top:
- HoustonList.org
- DateHouston.net
- HoustonGuest.net
- HoustonCharity.info
- LawyersHouston.info
- HoustonList.info
Though it has flaws, Freshdrop.net is a useful tool for the geodomainer, especially if you are looking to sell to end-users. Keep an eye out for TDNAM coupons too. They put them out from time to time.
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How To Use Freshdrop.net To Find Domain Names Part 1: Trends
I want to go more in depth on one of the tools I have listed on my domain name tools page. This post grew too large so I’ll be splitting it up into two parts.
FreshDrop.net is one of my favorite domaining tools. FreshDrop pulls feeds of expired/deleted domain names from TDNAM, Sedo, Afternic, Pool, Namejet, Snapnames and Tucows and lists them in a highly searchable/filterable database. The eBay feed is useless as it has a hard time reading the actual domain due to the way people use spaces when they type it in on the listings (It will read “trend domaining.com” as both “trend.com” and “domaining.com”).
The TDNAM, Sedo and Afternic feeds are free while the others require a pay registration. Today I want to concentrate on TDNAM, which is listed as both ‘Closeout’ and ‘Exp Names.’
‘Exp Names’ is the second to last stage before a name completely disappears. These are auctions starting at (usually) $10. If you are the only bidder when this stage of the name ends, you will receive the name for $10 plus registration fee. Of course, good domains are often found in this stage and the price can get much higher than $10. Don’t bid on a name until minutes before the auction ends. Bids are nothing more than a “Hey look here I’m a good name” sign.
‘Closeouts’ are names that get zero bids in the ‘Exp Names’ list and are always buy it now for $5 plus reg fee. This is your last chance to get these domains before they go poof. After they go poof you can freely register them anywhere, but you want to buy them here so you can keep their original registration date.
Using the filtering tool on the right of the page, we can narrow down exactly what we are looking for. A few days ago I wrote about the emerging trend of bamboo. Today I’ll use this keyword as an example on how to mine for great domain names.
The top section of the filtering tool lets you to filter out extensions you don’t want.
Section 2 lets you search by pagerank (and whether or not the PR is fake), age of domain and auction time left (day).
Section 3 is for your keyword and is self-explanatory.
Section 4 lets you exclude hyphenated domains, domains with numbers and domains that have www at the beginning as a typo (www.wwwtrenddomaining.com).
Section 5 lets you set a limit on the number of characters in a domain.
For this example, I set the filter as shown here on the right.
Doing a filtered search on the Closeout domains only gives us one name.
(A description of the columns can be found here.)
BambooWonderland.com isn’t a bad name. In fact, you could turn this into a site completely dedicated to bamboo products of all kinds. It’s a year old already, something that may help with the search engines. The word wonderland gives a euphoric feel to the word bamboo, something that emphasizes the green/organic trend you would be trying to capitalize on. And for $5 you could buy it now (well, after a couple days grace period).
Switching over to the Exp Names, we get a much larger list to work with:
I sorted this by age. A quick look shows that three domain names already have bids, again these are acting as a “Look at me!” sign: HongKongBamboo.com, BambooFuels.com and BambooExchange.com. HongKong could be good, as bamboo is already big in China and a site with this name could appear as an authority on bamboo (and it’s already 4 years old to boot). Fuel is a buzzword right now, though I’m not sure it works in this case as there is no bamboo fuel. Exchange, on the other hand, is a great keyword in this instance. This domain would be great for a buy/sell/trade site of all things bamboo.
Of the other names, I particularly like BambooLinks.com and BambooCarpentry.com. The former is obvious, but the latter would be great since bamboo flooring is already popular in the U.S. and furniture and cabinets should not be far behind.
These TDNAM names may not be top-of-the-line premium domains. But there are so many that expire every day that some do indeed slip through the cracks. At any given moment, there are more than 70,000 names in Closeout and 200,000 in Exp Names. There are domain names for almost any niche here. This is a prime place for buying names to develop or to flip. Many people buy closeout names for $15 ($5 plus reg fee) and flip them for $30 or $40. That’s 100% profit. Take it.
In part 2 I’ll go into how Freshdrop.net is one of the best tools for Geodomainers. View part 2 here.
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