Hiyall,
I noticed we have a few people relatively new to the industry, so I thought I would add some info about traffic:
Your name might be crap, but if it gets decent traffic, it may actually be worth something. The best way to find this out is to put a "For Sale" or some page up with a hit tracker that can tell you -
- hits (how many times the page is looked at - buyers rarely care about this statistic)
- uniques (how many people looked at that page - buyers very much care about this and will ask for either uniques/day or uniques/month figures)
- referrers (web page that the visitor came from to get to your page) - so you can tell how people are getting to your "For Sale" page
Type-ins are names that people type directly into their address bar in their browser - your stat tracker should describe it as "Direct Hits" or something. These are most valuable because they don't depend on other people linking to you or search engines. Overture can give you a rough idea of how many type-ins you get (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) but it may show nothing if you only have a few. Type your name into overture in the form of xyz.com. If you just type xyz, then this will not give you an idea of the uniques you are getting - it will give you an idea of how many people are searching for the phrase xyz.
Links from other websites are good, depending on the quality of the link. You can check your link popularity for the major at http://www.namepopper.com (NamePopper is a good bloke - he deserves a plug) in 7 of the biggest search engines. Make sure that when you have checked your link popularity (the total of pages linking to your site which you have just found out) you click on the individual numbers for each search engine, which will take you to each search engine with the results. Then you will get an idea of the type and quality of sites linking to you. Also, small link pop in a quality search engine is a squillion times better than big link pop in a crap one e.g. Google kick butt over Lycos.
If you buy a name that used to have a site on it, see if any pages are getting good rankings in the major search engines (each search engine will have a different method of finding this out) and then create pages with the exact address, so that search engine traffic arrives at the page you created when they click on the search engine link.
Remember that buyers will be checking all this stuff out as well, so if you advertise that your name has 5000 link popularity and buyers find out that the links are all crap (e.g. adult linking, where they create a page full of links just to boost search engine rankings) then - no sale.
The best thing you can do is have traffic stats for the last few months showing uniques and referrers and show those stats to the buyer.
Traffic quality is important as well e.g. traffic consisting of people looking for home loans is worth heaps more than traffic of people looking for freeware - you should be able to tell this by the actual domain name e.g. houseloans.com vs. abolutelyfreeware.com and by referrers if you are linked to.
If you have low quality traffic with low uniques, then the domain is worthless from a traffic point of view. A domain name traffic buyer HAS to AT LEAST make enough money from the traffic to cover registration fees of the name.
To give myself a plug
as I am a traffic name buyer, if you have any names that are getting decent traffic (over 20 uniques/day for good quality traffic or over 50 uniques/day for other), PM me. I am particularly interested in high traffic names, or packages of traffic names.
Hope this helps and hopefully I'll hear from you!
Cheers
Matt
I noticed we have a few people relatively new to the industry, so I thought I would add some info about traffic:
Your name might be crap, but if it gets decent traffic, it may actually be worth something. The best way to find this out is to put a "For Sale" or some page up with a hit tracker that can tell you -
- hits (how many times the page is looked at - buyers rarely care about this statistic)
- uniques (how many people looked at that page - buyers very much care about this and will ask for either uniques/day or uniques/month figures)
- referrers (web page that the visitor came from to get to your page) - so you can tell how people are getting to your "For Sale" page
Type-ins are names that people type directly into their address bar in their browser - your stat tracker should describe it as "Direct Hits" or something. These are most valuable because they don't depend on other people linking to you or search engines. Overture can give you a rough idea of how many type-ins you get (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) but it may show nothing if you only have a few. Type your name into overture in the form of xyz.com. If you just type xyz, then this will not give you an idea of the uniques you are getting - it will give you an idea of how many people are searching for the phrase xyz.
Links from other websites are good, depending on the quality of the link. You can check your link popularity for the major at http://www.namepopper.com (NamePopper is a good bloke - he deserves a plug) in 7 of the biggest search engines. Make sure that when you have checked your link popularity (the total of pages linking to your site which you have just found out) you click on the individual numbers for each search engine, which will take you to each search engine with the results. Then you will get an idea of the type and quality of sites linking to you. Also, small link pop in a quality search engine is a squillion times better than big link pop in a crap one e.g. Google kick butt over Lycos.
If you buy a name that used to have a site on it, see if any pages are getting good rankings in the major search engines (each search engine will have a different method of finding this out) and then create pages with the exact address, so that search engine traffic arrives at the page you created when they click on the search engine link.
Remember that buyers will be checking all this stuff out as well, so if you advertise that your name has 5000 link popularity and buyers find out that the links are all crap (e.g. adult linking, where they create a page full of links just to boost search engine rankings) then - no sale.
The best thing you can do is have traffic stats for the last few months showing uniques and referrers and show those stats to the buyer.
Traffic quality is important as well e.g. traffic consisting of people looking for home loans is worth heaps more than traffic of people looking for freeware - you should be able to tell this by the actual domain name e.g. houseloans.com vs. abolutelyfreeware.com and by referrers if you are linked to.
If you have low quality traffic with low uniques, then the domain is worthless from a traffic point of view. A domain name traffic buyer HAS to AT LEAST make enough money from the traffic to cover registration fees of the name.
To give myself a plug
as I am a traffic name buyer, if you have any names that are getting decent traffic (over 20 uniques/day for good quality traffic or over 50 uniques/day for other), PM me. I am particularly interested in high traffic names, or packages of traffic names.Hope this helps and hopefully I'll hear from you!
Cheers
Matt
