8 Tools To Find & Manage Domains

In my last post, I shared some domain prefixes and suffixes that help find great available domain names so I thought I’d continue on this path of sharing some more tools that I’ve personally been using to find and manage my growing domain portfolio.

Searching for domains

InstantDomainSearch.com – Instant domain availability search

Of course you can search for domains in plenty of different places but a while ago I came across this website that gave me instant availability status as I typed, an ajax domain search.

Pretty cool, I find having instant feedback like that, allows me to find domain much more quickly than if I had to click a submit button and wait for  a page to load every time I wanted to check for a domain. When you see that perfect domain is taken, try adding one of your favorite domain prefix or suffix to it and instantly see the availability. It’s a huge time saver.

On another note, being a web developer, I always have a few ideas on doing things that could be added to websites I visit and it’s no different on how this site could improve.

I’d like to see it give out suggestions on alternative domain names when the one you have typed is not available, similar to how other sites give you alternative when the domain you searched for is taken.

I think I might build a similar service or if someone out there wants to beat me to it, feel free, just give me the URL so I can start using your site I’d like to see a big list of prefix and suffix that it would search for and spit out the available ones based on your search.

Finding Great Domains

JustDropped.com – Expired Domains

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out if a domain you like is really a good one. I mean sometimes even if you like it, maybe you’re the only one. That’s part of the risk of buying domains with the intention of reselling them or even developing them.

A good indication that you might not be the only one to think it’s a good domain is if someone already registered it in the past – at  least you know there is at least one other person on earth who likes that domain name

There are many domain drop / expired services out there, my favorite is JustDropped.com You can get a free list of daily drops here: http://www.justdropped.com/drops/index.html and there are different paid services available.

Personally I’m subscribed to the keywords service which is really great. It emails you a list of dropped domain several times a day based on the keywords you specify so you don’t have to search that SUPER long list of dropped domains every day – yikes. But I sometimes glance through the complete list anyways when I have free time in case any good domains not matching my keywords pop out at me

Google Keyword Tool – Keyword Research

The Google keyword tool is great to find domains worth developing. Sometimes if I’m not sure if I want to register a domain that I like, I will turn to this tool to find out how many people are searching for the keywords contained in a domain.

For example if you have a domain you like called “redsportcars.com” and you’re not sure if you really like that domain enough to register it, you could look on the Google keyword tool to see how many people are searching for “red sport cars” and determine if it’s worth registering it to build something on it or if you can sell it to someone that will.

Something else worth looking at is, once you find that there is a good number of search… you may want to look at how much advertiser competition there is (the more ads when searching for that keyword phrase, the higher the advertiser competition)… then also look at how many results are returned from google.

If you have a keyword that is getting a lot of searches per month, not that many results returned in google and high advertiser competition, you’ve got a great domain name ripe for development.

Thesaurus – finding synonyms

When the obvious words are taken, why not look at synonyms? Sometimes you can find a great synonym that is just as good as the original word that you looked up. The web service is free but they do have a paid service option which is a great program called the visual thesaurus.

It’s sort of looks like a dynamic mindmap for synonyms. There’s a free trial for it, limited to a few searches to give you a feel for it. Either way, the paid or free version, searching for synonyms is a good tool to have to find great domain names.

And when there’s no synonyms available in your language, why not make up words plenty of sites do that, a good way is to combine 2 words together to make a new word.

Lets say for example you want to make a garage door website but garagedoors.com is taken, you could try garadoors or something like that

TranExp – Other Languages

Another possibility is to find synonym words, prefixes or suffixes in other languages.  My favorite is to look for latin variations of words, I use this site for that.

Latin is great because it’s where many languages of today originated so the words are usually easily pronounceable in english, french, etc.

Many great domains around have some latin in them. I think it gives it a touch of sophistication too… it shows imagination, innovation and thinking outside the box to have a name with a latin prefix or suffix.

SquadHelp – Ask Others- CrowSourcing for domain names

SquadHelp is a service that allows you to crowdsource for domain name ideas. Sometimes even with all the tools above you fall short of finding that perfect domain name, that’s when asking others can come in handy. You can ask people you know and trust (not the go and register the domain before you ) – or you could use a service like this one but you’ll have to pay Depending on the purpose of the name, it might very well be worth the investment.

Something I’d avoid is asking publicly somewhere, like a forum or twitter for example. You don’t want other domainers lurking around your forum thread and stealing all the good domain name ideas being thrown out. Of course most people would be helping you out and giving out good suggestions but it only takes one person in there to take the good domain name ideas and it was all for nothing. If you’re going to go this route, ask people not to give you ideas publicly but instead to private message you using the PM function these sites have.

GoDaddy – Buying Domain Names Cheap

As of late, my favorite place to get domain names is at Godaddy.com mainly because of the good discounts. If you use this link, it auto-apply a coupon to get your .com domains for $6.89 … you can’t beat that. I have a reseller account with Enom which I often use because of their great API and having some of my apps tied into it, but even with my reseller account, I still pay $7.98 per domain.

There’s PLENTY of other places to buy domains, I won’t bother listing them here  but another place I have an account is namecheap.com which have decent prices also.

Another reason I like GoDaddy lately is that I’m going after good expired domains and I like to grab all the good ones that dropped the same day before others hopefully have so I use their “Express Buy” Function which allows you to list all the domains you want, one per line and buy them all at once, saving time.

Managing all these domains

DomainRR – Domain management & reminders

If you’re like me, you have many domains with many different registrars, all with very different expiration dates. Keeping track of all the domains you have and their expiration date can be quite a challenge.

I can be just as disorganized as the next guy when it comes to things like this sometimes and I didn’t really think of a domain management system that would aggregate a list of all my domains, where they were registered and set reminders for their expiration but someone else did and when they listed this neat little service for sale this summer, I couldn’t resist and grabbed it.

I have some ideas for improving it further but it’s a great little tool for what it does right now even without any changes. So if you’re like me and you have many domains to manage, take a look. It’s free.

That’s it These tools combined with the prefixes and suffixes mentioned in the previous post is how I find my domain names. Do you have any favorite tools or tricks like this to find great domains? Please share in the comments.

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