Starting backwards, you’d be stupid to put your name on a company and in a global press release if you didn’t believe in the concept.  When we took out an IDNTools ad on the iconic Reuters billboard in Times Square it was a sign of our confidence in what is to come.  Similarly, when we issued an international press release (link here) briefly explaining why IDNs will be the next big opportunity, we did so proudly with facts to back up our assertions.

So what are the facts?  IDNs are any Internationalized Domain Names that require the use of foreign characters, such as 溧阳.com.  The billion plus population in China actually prefers to speak Chinese, type Chinese and read Chinese. Now that they can register Chinese domain names, aka IDNs, they have been taking advantage of the opportunity and will continue to do so.  The same is true for Japan, Russia, and many other countries.  Unfortunately, IDNs became available after the domain rush was well underway, and as such many domainers and businesses still don’t realize that IDN.com’s can be registered.

But why would you want to register a URL that starts in one language and ends in English (i.e. 溧阳.com)?  This is certainly not fluid to jump from one language to another.  The retort is twofold.  First, Chuck Gomes of Verisign announced that IDN.com will essentially be “aliased” to  IDN.IDN.  This means that the owner of (Chinese).com will also be the owner of (Chinese).(com-in-Chinese).  There is much value in having an IDN on both sides of the dot.

Even in the interim, before aliasing, IDN.com domains are precious.  After all, .com is a worldwide brand and it is easy for natives to switch between a native language (for the IDN domain) and English (for the .com extension).  In addition, the search volume for an IDN, as measured by the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, is many multiples of the traffic can be bought for a similarly priced ASCII (aka English .com) domain.  For instance, shorts.com in IDN can likely be bought for the price of (insert adjective)shorts.com in ASCII (English .com), and the IDN would be a wiser purchase in terms of having higher search volume and less competition.

If you wonder, why others aren’t buying yet?  They are.  The volume of public weekly sales on IDNForums continues to increase exponentially, and if you keep a close watch on the whois, you’ll see many top tier terms have changed ownership over the last few months, indicating stealth acquisitions. Interest in dropping domains is also taking off as highlighted by the steep increase in subscribers to our IDNDroplist.

No doubt this is a complex niche, and a new reader must have many questions.  So ask them.  Ask them in the comments, email us or Elliot, and we’ll address them in the next post.

Next post: IDN Q&A

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.  Aaron and Gary co-own  IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

Using Google Translate to translate English to [another language] is the # 1 mistake that all newcomers make. This is a telltale sign of one’s lack of experience. If you crawl back through 5 years of IDNForums threads, you’ll see this mistake time and time again when new members post an appraisal. Mainstream machine translators are often junk for individual words, and a high % of the time they are wrong. Autotranslators are really only good for translating sentences/paragraphs so that you get the rough idea of the context. So avoid machine translations, though they are simple and tempting. Just don’t do it, especially if you are a newbie and don’t yet appreciate the odds that the translation is wrong.

So what is the best way to get a translation? The best way to verify names is to start with a list of foreign terms that you believe to be the correct translation. Then either use a native colleague or use a foreign dictionary. Many foreign dictionaries are free, online, and are just as easy to use as autotranslators. You just need to know where to find them.

To get you started, the gold standard for Japanese online dictionaries is Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC dictionary. The beauty of this tool is that it reveals the part of speech (i.e. noun, adjective, verb), and whether the word is Kanji or Katakana (which is a transliteration, and sometimes not the prime translation). My rule of thumb is that when a domain I want to buy is selling for $400+ I will contact a native translation agency to verify the translation for me, as the extra $10-$20 is worth it for a substantial purchase. Alternatively there are many native speaking members at IDNForums who will often assist. Networking pays dividends in the IDN community.

Next post: Our Story: Aliasing and Times Square

Previois Post: Diversify Your Domain Portfolio: How IDNs are Registered in Punycode

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.  Aaron and Gary co-own  IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

You might have heard that people in other countries like to type, search, and create content in their native languages.  Investing in Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) is a way to capitalize on that trend, and for anyone who wants to diversify a domain portfolio, buying a number of IDNs is a must.

I am not fluent in any foreign languages, (though I come close with Hebrew).  How can I register IDNs in large countries such as China, which has more people than any other country in the world?  Is it a problem than I am not a native speaker and that I do not have Chinese characters on my keyboard?

It is actually fairly simple.  All you need is a good, free online dictionary and a punycode converter.

Step 1: Translation
If you use a reliable foreign dictionary and translate “Liyang”, the Chinese city,  from English to Chinese you will get 溧阳.com

Step 2: Punycode Conversion
Then if you want to register this name, many registrars require you to register it using the punycode representation of these characters.  If you copy and paste 溧阳.com into the IDNTools punycode converter, you can just press the convert button and you will get the punycode representation of this word xn--y9wq75f.com.

Step 3: Registration
Then go register xn--y9wq75f.com.  As a result, if someone types in 溧阳.com into a browser, you would own that page and can develop it like any other.  Even better is that IDN keywords are not as competitive so if one were to do SEO, you would be in a great position for the valuable keyword “溧阳“.

Step 4: Bulk Registration
Now that you understand the basics, you can still hand register some great IDNs, and the best way to check for availability is in bulk.  Pull together a few hundred English keywords.  Translate. Punycode convert.  And availability check.

Caveats
A few hurdles still exist, though they can be leapt over.  First, you are bound to make some translation mistakes as some dictionaries aren’t always accurate.  We’ll show you in the next post how to use the best dictionaries, and when to use natives to minimize mistakes.  We’ll also explain that the question “why would anyone register a foreign name, then dot an English extension?” is resolved by .com being aliased to foreign extensions.

Next post: Translating Domain Names

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.  Aaron and Gary co-own  IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

My wife and I had dinner the other night with Aaron Krawitz and his wife, Emily. Aaron and I met at a New York domain investor get together, and not only are we both domain investors, but our wives are in the same year of graduate school working on a similar degree. Aaron is an Ivy-League graduate and currently works at a prestigious New York firm.

While our wives talked about internships and the field of Psychology, Aaron and I talked about domain names and investing. Aaron has significant IDN domain name investments, and I know next to nothing about them. I asked Aaron if he would write a guest post about IDNs so I can share with my readers why he and others are so passionate about them. Aaron and his business partner, Gary Males, wrote the following. Hope you enjoy.

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Any domainer worth his salt knows the history of the pioneers in the domain industry and how in the 90’s they took a risk on buying generic domain names.  Back in the pre-Google days, there was no business model, no parking, no affiliates, no monetization – you have to admire these innovators as they took a calculated risk and have been rewarded.

How many domainers have found themselves wishing they could have done that or that they could go back in time to the 90’s?  IDNs are exactly that opportunity.

There are 100+ million domains registered today; and the majority of these are in English.  There are only 1 million IDNs registered, and that is across ~200 different languages.  Do the math – that means there is tremendous opportunity.

It’s like a 1990’s Groundhog Day, but with the benefit of knowing you can monetize domains and there is end-user demand for virtual real estate.

So what are Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)?

They are domains that contain at least one letter not found on a traditional English keyboard.

IDNs really make a difference in countries with languages that do not use letters based on the English language; countries like Japan, China and Korea whose languages consists of symbols.  In contrast, in Spanish, French or Portuguese, it is easy to avoid IDNs and to simply substitute unaccented letters.

In these countries where the language differs so much from English, and also coupled with a nationalistic population, you can begin to see why users would use their native language over English, which is where the IDN advantage is.

As you start to take a closer look at other languages, you begin to see some unique properties that spell another opportunity.  Take for example the Japanese or Chinese language – there is no such thing as plurals, so every Japanese or Chinese term doubles up as both the single and plural version.  In other words, 2 for the price of one.  Also some Japanese words mean the same thing in Chinese, so from a domainers perspective your one domain registration now, not only means the single and plural, but it can also reach the combined population of China and Japan (1.5 billion) people – that’s 5 times more than the U.S.

Japan as an example has a very vibrant ecommerce industry, but to date, had no real use for English domain names they cannot read or remember; so what do they do, they don’t advertise the domain name, they advertise by displaying an image of someone searching in the search engine with a Japanese word, and then just buy the Adwords for that Japanese word to try and capture the searcher.  Sounds a little strange to us, when we are so used to seeing domain names in every walk of life – but that’s how it has evolved.  Domain names and IDNs definitely have a branding advantage over search box advertising.

Early domain pioneers took risks in the 1990’s not knowing what the future would look like; so what are the risks for IDN investors?

The single biggest risk, all surrounds IDN.IDN – in other words, today IDNs can be registered in .com .net .org .info .cn .jp etc – but the real benefit of IDNs is in full IDN, that is, the extension in foreign language too.

ICANN has been struggling with this for years, and will soon be inserting the first IDN extension in the root.

Dot com IDNs will remain valuable in most language as the dot com is a recognizable brand easily typed on foreign keyboards. Switching from a foreign language to English to type the “.com” is second nature, just as you or I shift characters to capitalize while typing a sentence.  In countries such as Japan, dot com is many times more popular than their ccTLD, and there are many examples of companies branding on an IDN.com.

If you still believe that an IDN extension is the holy grail to IDNs, then you can take comfort in a white paper released by Verisign that states that they intend to make available transliterated IDN versions of “com” and “net”, and alias them to the non-IDN version. This is the ideal solution after all, it provides full IDNs but leverages the brand of “com” etc that everyone is so accustomed to.

With hindsight, we all know what we should have done 15 years ago, but most of us didn’t do anything…so given what is most likely the 2^nd and last domain gold rush opportunity, this time with IDNs…what will you do?  There is a risk, some say minimal, some say calculated, but the size of the prize should be enormous; this we know from the current high traffic levels on IDNs.

Another reason why people tend to shy away from IDNs is because investing in foreign markets can be accompanied by a steep learning curve, especially if you do not speak the language. With this in mind, we have launched the first 2 dedicated IDN services:

IDNnewsletter.com – A subscription based, hand picked list of our members’ top IDNs for sale, and all of the IDNs listed will have been certified by a native speaker.

IDNtools.com – a set of IDN measurement tools, drop lists and translations.

This guest post was written by Gary Males and Aaron Krawitz, co-owners of IDNTools.com and IDNNewsletter.com.  You can also follow Gary and Aaron at IDNDemystified.com and at IDNBlog.com.