I had never had a parked domain name earn more than $15 in a single day – until yesterday! The domain name (parked at Fabulous) only received 4 unique visitors yesterday, but it earned a total of just about $20. It received six clicks to reach that sum, but WOW!

Does anyone else have any stories like this – where a name gets between $1-5/day and all of a sudden it gets $20 for no extraordinary reason?

Like an elephant in the room, the 4 letter domain craze can’t be ignored anymore. While most of the average names were worth anywhere from $10-40 for many years, the values seem to have risen to between $150-200+ within the past few weeks. Everyone seems to want to get their hands on these names, and although I don’t see a reason for the rise in value other than speculation. I’ve seen all the arguments about why they have considerable value and why people are buying them so rapidly:

– End users want them because there are many acronyms
- Many stock symbols are made of 4 letters
- Easier to recall than longer domain names
- They are rare
- There aren’t any left to register

The impetus came a few months ago when a domain investor decided to buy the remaining LLLL.com domain names that were available to register. When people saw that these names were no longer available for the registration fee, they began paying much more to acquire these names. The values rapidly rose, and now we are at price levels that I believe may be unjustified.

Although I own a few of these names and I have friends that own them as well, I think the hype is (more…)

When buying a keyword domain name, it is important to know how many people search daily for the keywords that make up the domain name. You might have the most targeted website for the keywords, rank number one in the search engines and have the best website design, but if nobody is searching for those keywords on a frequent basis, it will be difficult to earn a return on your investment.

Many people reference Google’s search results to cite how much information exists for certain keywords. While Google will show how many times the keyword is mentioned on the Internet, it fails to show how many people are actually searching for it. Using Google for this can be misleading, because there can be much more information about a topic than people searching for it.

The Overture search tool  was a good indicator of the number of searches that were performed monthly but Yahoo has eliminated that tool.  I’ve used Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery before and both offer good indications of what keywords people search. If you own the domain name of these keywords, you have a strong search engine optimization advantage over everyone else. Once you upload relevant content and have someone optimize your site, you could see an increase in revenue.