You can now buy your domains direct from domain-shopper.co.uk
That’s right we’ve taken the plunge ourselves and become domain registrars!
You can now search and buy domains directly from buy.domain-shopper.co.uk our online store.
Our domain service is a little more expensive than some of the cheapest registrars out there, but we offer some useful additions to the standard buying experience, such as high quality alternative domain suggestions should your chosen name be taken and listings of premium already owned domains marked for resale.
We also process all payments in US Dollars because, as we’re a UK based website, there are savings to be made on the currency conversion
So why not check us out today
UK Businesses: Get Yourself Online for Free!
Thanks to a great new initiative between Google, BT and Enterprise UK it is now possible for UK business owners to get their business online for free.
It’s called Getting British Businesses Online and it’s all about inspiring companies who don’t yet have their details accessible online to setup a basic website to serve as an online flyer and point of contact (in it’s simplest form)
There’s no real catch to it and it even offers (free – I think) formal training sessions in basic website management which makes it a really good scheme for business owners new to the area.
The individual services on offer are fairly basic compared to some paid for solutions, but they’re also actually very powerful when used correctly together and pitched at just the right level for newbies.
In all I can’t fault this service at all and would suggest anyone new to setting up websites make full use of what it has to offer.
I expect there will be a lot of ancillary marketing associated to the service, particularly from Google for Adwords and BT for business hosting, once you’ve outgrown the package on offer but all in all if you are willing to come up to speed with the basics of the industry during your first free year as a website owner, you’ll soon be able to spot which offers are worth taking up and which aren’t.
You can visit the Getting British Businesses Online website by clicking here
We at domain-shopper.co.uk offer consultancy services for anyone wanting to get a business or organisation online for the first time, monetise an existing idea on the web or who needs advice on the best web strategy to undertake for their business.
If you would like to know more about our consultancy services and for advice on whether the Getting British Businesses online scheme is appropriate for you please contact us
How much is my website worth? – Using sedo to determine the value of a domain
Sedo is one of the most prolific domain brokering services around, allowing domain owners to auction off their domain names to buyers from all around the world.
They act like any other traditional auction house and offer a number of services relating to the buying and selling of domains, appraisals of domain quality and cost, as well as other ancillary services such as domain parking.
When buying (or selling) a domain alone (i.e. without some associated business to go with it), it can be hard to gauge exactly how much the domain may be worth. This why sedo provide their domain appraisal service, taking your domain name, running through a bunch of tests on their servers and then finally coming up with a figure they think you should sell it for (generally via them).
This is all well and good, but they charge for this service and most people won’t want or need to go this far, they’ll just need a quick idea of the domain’s value so they know they are charging or paying a fair price for it.
The easy way of finding this information out, is to do a keyword search on sedo’s domain catalogue for your domain name. By looking at the results this search returns you should be able to find domains with similar names to yours and thereby get a good estimate of what your domain is worth by comparison.
Take this domain (domain-shopper.co.uk) for example. doing a keyword search on sedo for domain shopper gives these results and I can see that domainshoppers.com is on for $1788 USD and domain-shopper.com is on for $995 USD.
So, if this domain was a .com I’d expect it to fetch on average around $1400 USD. As it’s a .co.uk I may reduce this by an arbitary 25% and thus expect it to fetch about $1000.
Easy huh?
If your search on sedo didn’t return anything useful (or even if it did!) it may be worth trying the same search and comparison process on some of the other big domain auction houses such as those listed below.
Domain auction houses:
Tools for researching new niches and business ideas on the internet
The starting point when researching new niches and potential business ideas on the internet is almost always the domain name of any existing similar websites.
You can generally determine some valuable information about a website by simply looking up the whois record for that website’s domain name.
As you can see from the result for this page, the whois record itself is simply just a note about when the domain was registered, how long it is registered for, who owns the domain and the internet address of the server where the website’s files are held. Though minimal, we can deduce certain things about a website’s ‘pedigree’.
A website has to serve a purpose, either commercially or informationally to be worth being kept online. Someone has to pay for the hosting and domain registration each year, so unless a website is serving a purpose there is little motivation for it being kept online.
So, the older the domain is, generally speaking, the longer current website at that domain has been running, and the better quality that website should be, and the better rankings it should have in the search engines as it’s a good, established, source of information.
The length of time left before the domain’s registration has expired is also important.
If someone has registered a domain for a long time, this represents a long term investment in that domain, and generally the website that resides at the end of it.
So if a domain has a long history and is registered for a long time into the future it can be presumed that it’s going to hold some quality content.
The next main thing that is generally useful is the registrant information i.e. who bought this domain?
A company, an indvidual and what may they be using it for – to provide information, or something with a more commercial angle?
If it’s a company you can (at least in the UK) do a search on the companies house website for that company, determine to an extent how much it makes from its tax records and in some cases asertain something about how much that domain may be worth to the company.
There are many whois services out there, some of the best known ones being:
- Network Solutions
That’s the basics derived from a standard whois record, but you can determine even more about a domain from the history of its whois record.
This is where whois monitoring tools such as those provided mainly for free from domaintools.com come into play. You can see this site’s details on domain tools by clicking here
Domain tools will show you all kinds of useful historical things about a domain, such as its who is and name server history which basically relates to how many times the domain has moved in the past and therefore how many times it’s changed hands over the years.
Like anything, a domain with one careful owner is probably going be ‘better’ or more ‘reliable’ than one that’s been transferred all over the internet.
There are many other things domaintools.com can offer and are adding to their service all the time, so I won’t go into any more detail right now other than to suggest you check it out for yourself.
Overall I think I would have to recommend domaintools.com as THE best domain research tool currenly availible. Couple this with data from SEDO, the waybackwhen machine and now Google trends and you have a very powerful toolkit for domain and niche online business research.