There might be a real estate slump when it comes to houses and real property, but there is definitely no slump in the realm of Digital Real Estate. Buying and selling web sites has become a huge business and there seems to be no downturn in demand. But as with physical real estate, flipping digital real estate can only make you money if you can show that your web page has good value to a prospective customer and also has a great location! Here are some guidelines to finding great potential domains, adding value and developing location, location, location!
You’re not going to find an real estate outsourcing undiscovered empty storefront for sale cheap on Rodeo Drive. By the same token, you will not be able to snatch up a great.com domain that’s already ranking on the first page of Google for popular searches. But in the digital real estate world, you can potentially find a bargain empty store front in a back alley somewhere, build it into a valuable property and move it to Main Street!
The first issue is to find a domain that’s already established or purchase a new domain that uses a good keyword phrase as the domain name. What’s a “good” keyword phrase? Something that targets a relatively small niche and has a reasonable number of searches for that phrase, yet has low competition to rank on the first page of that phrase.
For example, it would be great to own the domain CorvetteRestoration.com. That would be a great niche. There are tons of people looking for information on restoring Corvettes. That particular keyword phrase receives over 8,000 searches a month according to the Google keyword analysis tool. Is it available? Not a chance. You’re talking #1 Rodeo Drive on the Digital Real Estate address list for the Corvette restoration niche. And everyone else on the first page of Google for Corvette Restoration are high authority fortresses that you would be foolish to try to assault. Getting to the top of page two will do you little good. It’s page one or nothing.
But can you find a less trafficked domain that can still serve you well? How about something with 50 or 100 daily searches and low competition? If you can get that property on some back alley and develop it, you may still have a highly profitable web site to market. Let’s try something like ‘Corvette World” or “Corvette trader” or even “Corvette frame”. While these phrases won’t generate the hundreds of daily searches that your original Rodeo Drive page would, the neighborhood is still respectable with between 75 and 112 searches per day at the time of this writing. And the first page has domains that are much more vulnerable. As long as your domain has some form of these keywords in it (even with hyphens or in a different order) and it’s a.com,.org or.net TLD, you have something you can work with.
By the way, I highly recommend using a keyword research tool to help you find these good potential phrases. I use Market Samurai and found these three in a few minutes. It gives me the keyword and vital information about the other domains that I would be going up against for that first page ranking. You can do it yourself manually with all the tools Google provides for free, but it will take much, much more time.