If you visit a museum and observe, every visitor enters through the same door, goes down the same hallways, and will see the exact same literal things, but will also see things differently based upon their unique perspectives. In this article I want to make you think differently about domain names. Do you buy domain names because you like them, or do you buy them because you know others will need them? Maybe you need to think like an end user and not as much like a domainer? Do you think the way a marketing agency would think? Maybe consider things that marketing agencies do. Look for patterns they display (every marketing agency likes to show off their work) and it could spark an idea. Take a moment to look at the way you do things in life and then look at each one from a different perspective.
Example:
One day I was doing the same thing most of us do regularly – I was browsing over a list of expired domains. Plenty of other domain investors do this and we most likely all look at the same data. Most of the tools I use are the same ones easily accessible by every other investor out there. Essentially, we are all walking down the same hallway at the museum. We are all seeing the same domains, just people are looking at them with different perspectives. I like this one, I like that one. The person behind you may like the exact same domains as you, or possibly not like any of the same as you. Since domains are all unique, the good ones will shine based on certain metrics, but gold doesn’t shine without being polished. Some will be hidden and will shine with different data.
I thought to myself, “Everyone is looking at the exact same data that I am. It’s why all the auctions have so many bidders and I’m constantly being bid out of my small budget!” The majority of people are using the same data to find what domains to bid on and that’s the problem. It doesn’t help that my budget isn’t very high, which to some could be a whole other problem. But, sometimes you just need to find other ways. It can be frustrating until you look at it from a different perspective.
I decided that I would set out to find different data. It wasn’t easy and I didn’t discover the data sets overnight. In fact, I thought certain data would yield better results than others during the discovery process, but I ended up finding that two different data sets, once combined, produced a totally different set of domain names. It was a bit crazy, but both feeds were important. Since the data was different than the data most others were looking at, to my surprise, many of these domains were getting no bids. I could win most of the names I wanted, and even drop catch some for standard registration fees. I’m not talking home run balls, though. Just some nice doubles, triples, and a few in-park home runs.
I played around with the whole data collection process manually for a month or so. It was extremely time-consuming because I was using web scraping to test the idea, and that process required lots of manual work. After overcoming one hurdle I then ran into another when the website I was using blocked my IP. It eventually reached a point where I had to pump the brakes on the project because it was too time-consuming to test and make work with my IP blocked. In the end, I learned that looking at things from a different perspective could yield very different results. It wasn’t easy but it was an approach that others were not doing. I was using different data and just testing out different things. I tried a lot of different data and just happened to notice two that worked better than everything else. Without looking at it differently, I likely never would have tried it. I didn’t end up with a fix-all solution, but I do know that I can create something different than what the majority are using with a promising result by looking and acting with a different perspective.
