How to do a building inspection on virtual real estate

When you first enter the virtual real estate world it can be really hard to assess how much a domain is worth. With normal real-estate, you look at the location primarily, you would hopefully get a building inspection done and hope that the house had small issues that wouldn’t cost you much to fix so you could push the price down. Then you would do a rental assessment on it, if you would look at holding onto it for the value increase. The next step would be to assess where the market is now, and where it needs to be when you sell it. When you buy virtual real-estate you do go through similar steps, but since it hasn’t been around as long as normal real-estate people find it more daunting. Making money on the Internet is like making money in the “real world”, you need a business sense and the ability to see profit that may not yet be there. Everyone can make money in the real world, you just need to work but there are only a few people that make a lot of money. The key is to learn the ropes, sometimes you just have to take a risk. The good thing with online business is that it doesn’t cost as much as doing business off line, the key to successful businesses is to take very calculated risks and learn from the mistakes. So I will go through some processes that will teach a bit on how to calculate those risks and learn the basics and fundamentals of the expired domain industry. At the end of the day, most people that trade domains doesn’t due to their enormous passion for domains, they do it to create a blueprint for generating a substantial online income. This is just a short guide covering the very basics on tools that you can use to learn how to assess a domain.

One of the first thing that you need to do, is to learn about the expired domain that you’re about to purchase this is what will help you in the long run. There are a lot of different tools that you can use to do this; I will show you some of them here:

You can use Way back Archive to learn how the domain looked in the past, things that you will look for would be what was the main activity, what products were sold, and what information did it provide. Now you are probably wondering why you need to know these things. You use it to help you design the future strategy for your business.

Another great tool is Overture Keyword Selector; this is something that I use every day for various projects. “Overture” display how many times a someone searched the particular key word in the major search engines over a specific period of time.

Alexa ratings (http://www.alexa.com/) is a website that particular domains based on the total numbers of visitors. They have a free toolbar that you can download to do your searches.

Link pop is a tool you can use to find out the total amount of links to other websites. It will help you detect incoming links and incoming traffic to a domain.

To discover the commercial importance of an expired domain I would suggest PR (Google Page rank). The commercial importance is decided by the amount of votes it has received by links and sources from different portals.

All of these tools will be a good start for you to practise your “assessing” and evaluation skills to discover the best possible quality of a particular expired domain. To summarise, the basics key factors to consider before you buy: Try to judge the accuracy of you link pop estimates, what is the most probable income traffic and links and how will it turn to dollars, overture keyword evaluation to test what advertisers are paying for targeted traffic finally you have to check if it provides a click through rate of roughly 5% (which is usually the hardest part). If it doesn’t you have to try to assess if it would be worth putting in some work to get it to that level, would you have to spend a lot of money, are you good at driving traffic, what free options are there and how long would you estimate it to take etc.

Another thing that you need to evaluate if you decide to hold onto it is, will it be worth it for you to do the work your self, or are you better off outsourcing? If you are already managing several other income streams, it sometimes feels like you are doing nothing but working. If the domain have good revenue and you think that you could easily get an ROI of 300% you may want to look at outsourcing.