I just received an email from my friend Aaron Krawitz announcing a newly established relationship between domain registrar Register.com and the IDN domain experts at IDNNewsletter.com. Register.com selected IDN Newsletter to broker its in-house portfolio of IDN domain names. I think this represents a new revenue opportunity for Register.com and it says a lot about the knowledge of the IDN Newsletter team of Aaron and Gary Males.

It’s nice to hear about mutually beneficial partnerships like this, and I wish both companies all the best.  Today’s news release follows:

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As you might expect, Register.com has a vault full of premium names in its in-house portfolio.  The company is one of the oldest and most storied registrars with over 13 years in the domain and web services industry.  Register.com’s vault includes troves of premium IDNs that the registrar maintained until the IDN market began to mature.

Now, Register.com has decided to open the vault and sell a select portion of its IDNs to the general public.  As such, it chose IDNNewsletter.com as the exclusive domain brokerage platform for this sale.  IDNNewsletter is run by Gary Males and Aaron Krawitz, the duo who also founded IDNTools, IDNBlog and IDNDemystified.

Krawitz said “it is an honor to have been given access to Register.com’s IDN vault, and we doubled our efforts, hiring multiple sets of native speakers and consulting with our colleagues as we vetted and priced these names.”  Males added that “IDNNewsletter is serious about catering to our many newsletter subscribers and there are some tremendous bargains that you will be seeing in the coming weeks.”

Among the blockbuster names that will be up for sale are ラブ.com (“Love” in Japanese) and כיף.com (“Fun” in Hebrew”)

The highly anticipated IDNNewsletter / Register.com launch is planned for the first week of May and will be exclusively going out to IDNNewsletter subscribers.

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.