On a recent break, I had to do a reasonable amount of travel by road and I couldn’t help noticing how many personalised number plates there were on passing cars.

I’ve noticed this trend for some time happening in our area, which is quite an affluent part of the country, but to see what it’s like elsewhere is also interesting.

Personalised number plates/ cherished number plates/ private plates, whatever you want to to call them, have been around for quite a few years, but it’s only relatively recently that a greater number of people have been buying them.  I would say that 50 percent of all the cars I see have one. Read more …

There are lots of Hollyhocks outside my window at the moment, outside of several windows actually.  Beautiful, statuesque, flowers with fantastic variety in color, are just one of the inspirations of summer.

According to Wikipedia there are sixty species of Hollyhock and the latin name of the most common is Alcea rosea. Read more …

By junk mail, I mean the physical stuff that comes through your door almost every day.  It’s not always necessarily unsolicited mail; I get plenty from my bank that I have an account with for instance, but most of it is still junk all the same.

About a year ago, Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame, wrote a great post on using junk mail to find new keywords.  It’s also a great way to create new domain names. Read more …

Firstly, I’d like to thank Francois for including my feed at Domaining.com; this site was a ‘must-see’ when I first read about it and now it’s a daily read with so many excellent contributors.

My own domaining journey started about a year ago, so I’m still learning and looking forward to learning more.

One of the parallels that is drawn in domaining is between domains and real estate.  It’s an old comparison to many established domainers, but it certainly helps when needing to keep focused.  It’s also a great way to explain to those who don’t quite ‘get it’ yet. Read more …

The Domaining business has its ups and downs like any other industry.  There are times of frustration and times of sheer joy, well at least that’s what I’ve found.

This is my official one year anniversary in the domaining world and there have been times when I’ve thought about letting it go and moving on.  However, today I’ve pulled all my domain parking stats together in a spreadsheet, which I do as much as possible to give me a clearer idea of my assets and liabilities and how to move forward.

One particular domain is doing pretty well and I’m pleased to have bought it.  It’s a holiday domain that I hand-registered for $7.50 back in the winter, so I didn’t expect it to do anything really until the holiday season was underway.  I was a bit doubtful about buying it at first, it’s not a short domain, 22 letters long actually, very long-tail in nature, but it was one that I just instinctively felt I should buy. Read more …

Actually it’s not specifically a domaining tool, but very useful none-the-less.

There are many occasions when you do research on a particular domain or in a particular niche, when you are shown a table of results for link popularity, google phrase matches, cost per click for particular search terms and so on. It’s not always easy to log the information quickly in a spreadsheet for analysis; sorting, filtering etc. Read more …

Well I’ve been fortunate enough to have a week’s holiday, which passed by far too quickly. I’m now revved up and ready for more domaining action.

As of today, I’m back full-time and one of the first encouragements I’ve found is how many good domaining groups there are springing up on Facebook. In fact my newly found Facebook friend, Ritesh belongs to a good list of domain related groups, that I just had to join. Read more …

In my last post, How I Create Domain Names (Part 1), I looked at using the CONCATENATE function, (in Excel) , especially the shorthand version using the Ampersand (&) to join words to create 2, 3 or maybe more word combinations and reveal new possibilities.

Using Excel you can quickly generate different combinations, but what if you’re having trouble thinking of related words and concepts to use with the starter word? Read more …

This is the first part of a series about how I create domains which could have resale value even if undeveloped, or could be developed and sold and/or monetized.

I love using Excel to create spreadsheets and spreadsheet applications which I hope will save me time with tasks now and in the future. Domains demand a lot of my spreadsheet creation time nowadays; after all there’s financial stats, lists and all sorts of other information you can log and analyze.

I created my own ‘Domain Creation’ spreadsheet which I hope to gradually improve over time and one of the functions which I found to be useful in this case is the CONCATENATE function. Read more …

One of my favourite domaining tools is Domain Name Analyzer (DNA) by Domain Punch.

For those of us who are cash-strapped most of the time it’s free to download and use. I love it because you can put in a few hundred or more domain ideas and it checks for availability against the whois database. Read more …