Whats your domain name worth
Perhaps it is better to ask how much a potential buyer would be willing to pay to acquire your domain name. If there was some interest in your domain name, you ought to, at least, have some kind of idea of its value. Generally, is the domain good or bad If good, how good is it
If you were to visit any domain reseller sites, you will find literally thousands of ridiculous names. If you scrutinize their asking prices, it will leave you shaking your head in amazement. They run into the thousands and even millions. Names like ApeChatsWorth.com.....It would be better to let them expire or sell cheap if you can find a fool.
So how do you tell if you have a winning name
I know someone will be quick to say, Thats easy. Get them appraised.
Well, you could do that. But the problem with domain appraisals is that there are no industry standards. And you simply cannot put a market value on it and give an accurate appraisal by any standards. Perhaps, in that sense, a domain name is different from real estate because it is not something you can see or touch.
There are numerous companies and sites on the web that will evaluate your domain and give you their opinion on what your domain name is worth. Their services cost anywhere from between $10 to $50. They give you a nice certificate online. But let me tell you that, an appraisal certificate may not necessarily do anything for your domain name.
As can be expected, a single domain name can have vastly differing values when evaluated by different appraisers. Values can differ by tens of thousands of dollars.
You have probably heard it being said over and over again that a domain name is only really worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it. Or what the buyer and seller can agree on to make a deal. So even if a domain name has been evaluated at $2,000 but if no one wants to pay out more than $200 for it, it is obvious the real value of the name is far less than the perceived value that it was originally appraised for.
If you have absolutely no idea what your domain name is worth, getting a professional appraisal may be useful as well as to give you a basis for an asking price if there was indeed someone interested in the name or simply to decide what you want to do with the domain name. A potential buyer already interested in a domain name you have, may be further swayed towards your position by an independent appraisal.
However, let me caution you to be careful. There are a number of thriving scams on the internet designed to play on your emotions and get your money. One instance is when a so-called buyer feigns interest in your domain name but requests first for an appraisal from a particular appraiser, just to be sure of the market value, he claims. Then, insists that no other appraisers will do. It doesnt take a genius to see through this. If you pay for the appraisal, the so-called buyer suddenly disappears, no doubt to fleece his next victim. Many fall for this cruel trick in their ecstasy imagining that finally, there was actually someone wanting their domain name. Before you spend any money, check out feedback on the websites services from other customers. You can do this at Alexa.com. Simply enter the name of the website and you can see reviews and feedback from other customers.
A genuine buyer who wants your domain name is interested in it, NOT because some appraiser says it is worth a princely sum. But only because he himself sees its intrinsic value and/or has specific plans for the name. Keep this in mind.
There are a number of free domain appraisal services you could try just to test the waters around your name.
A number of domain name forums have active appraisal boards where you can post your domain names and someone will evaluate it for you. A search on your favorite engine will give you several options.
You may also have come across automated computer scripts online that give you a free instant evaluation of your domain name when you put in certain required details about your name. Those give you a ballpark figure but sometimes do grossly inflate the value. It is after all a script.
If you do decide to get and pay for a professional appraisal, make sure you are engaging a reputable company or you would end up blowing your money.
If youre still undecided, let me take a look at your domain name and Ill evaluate it for free. No obligations. See http://www.OpenForSale.com/ to submit your domain name.
Copyright 2005 Edwin John
Edwin John is the author of the top-selling domain ebook, How I Sell My Domain Names. A guide that teaches domain owners how to find buyers for their domain names.Visit:
If internet is about interactivity between websites, domain name is the door for that interactivity. It is your online identity, very much like the name of your best friend, what is his very own personal identity.
From a users point of view, a domain name is what he types in the address bar of his web browser to get a certain web site. For example, domain name of our website is www.kigoobe.com and one can get access to this site using the domain name www.kigoobe.com.
However, the scene behind the screen is not exactly the same. Though we see that computers use domain names to communicate over the internet, the basic things that they use to communicate is something called Internet Protocol Address (also called IP address). It is something numerical and a simple IP address can be like 10100011.00011011.00010101.10010011
This kind of combination of zeros and ones is called binary number system. To make things easier for people IP addresses are translated from binary to decimal numbers and the result becomes something like: 189.01.23.255 This looks simpler, but when thousands and millions of websites are in question, this kind of number system, though better than the first one, was still posing problem and then at last in 1983, the University of Wisconsin came forward with a solution to it, and that was to replace these numeric values with suitable text formats.
So here starts the story of www.kigoobe.com or www.yahoo.com or www.microsoft.com. Of course you will agree, that this is much easier to remember than all these 1 2 3 4 etc.
Another term important in this context and what you may come across quite often is URL. An URL (Uniform Resource Locator) can be said as the exact address that holds your domain name. For example, URL of the domain name www.kigoobe.com will be http://www.kigoobe.com. To see that in action, open another window and type in www.kigoobe.com in its address bar. If you press the enter key after that, you will see that kigoobe.com has been changed to http://www.kigoobe.com as the page loads. Thats the URL. The browser changes it itself.
If we break this in different parts, we will find http, www, kigoobe, and com.
http: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. Protocol stands for a set of rules for these kinds of communications. Transfer we all know. Hyper text stands for texts that contain links to other texts, and which is not constrained to be linear only. It can thus hold text, graphics, images, sound, video, and other multimedia files, etc.
Now if we take all together, http or hyper text transfer protocol stands as a set of rules that come into being during transfer of those kinds of hyper text files over the internet.
www: World Wide Web. It refers to all the publicly accessible websites of the world. Besides it also includes ftp (file transfer protocol) files, usenet newsgroups, etc.
kigoobe: It can be anything, something that you choose yourself. We have chosen Kigoobe, somebody else chose one day yahoo, you can choose yourname, or yourbusiness, whatever.
com: The most commonly used first level domain name. Other first level domain names include .org, .net, .edu, .gov, .us, .fr, etc.
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Happy surfing.Cheers.
A Master in biological anthropology, the author is the owner of a Paris based web designing firm Kigoobe.
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