Become a Travel Agent

Home Based Travel Agents,
What's in a (Domain) Name?
Tom Ogg

When the Bank of America paid three million dollars for the domain name Loans.com, entrepreneurs everywhere started looking at registering and investing in domain names as serious business. In fact, the business of buying and selling domain names is maturing to the point where a travel agent wanting a memorable domain name is more likely to purchase from one of the brokers, rather than simply registering it with one of the domain name registrars.

Keyword domain names are currently the hot investment. A keyword domain name is made up of two or more keywords that web surfers would use to find information in a search engine. “Cruise Reviews” or www.CruiseReviews.com is a keyword domain name that captures surfers looking for cruise reviews on the Internet. Since owning a keyword domain name gains one about a 17% relevancy advantage in Google, they are in high demand. Keyword domain names are especially of interest to travel agents because clients use them to research for information about their travel plans.

Once registered, domain names simply point to a web site’s “Internet Protocol” or IP address. Each computer that is connected to the Internet receives a unique IP address (much like a personal telephone number) that the domain name is directed to point at. Try looking at http://128.121.113.162, this is the IP address that www.CruiseReviews.com points at and visiting either will result in a visit the same website. One can easily change the IP address that a domain name points to if they change servers that use a different IP address.

Think about potential keywords that would lead clients to your web site (s) that would be specific enough to capture high rankings in search engines. Examples would be like WaikikiBeachReservations.com, MediterraneanCruiseReservations.com or CaribbeanSCUBADiving.com would all be good examples. Keyword domain names should be representative of the content that resides on the web site that they point at. Having a specific keyword domain name pointing at a general site that is not the focus of the keywords will only frustrate web surfers that are looking for specific information.

How to Register a Domain Name

Originally Network Solutions had a monopoly on registering domain names. It used to cost $70 for the first two years of registration. Some years ago, the registration of domain names was deregulated and ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and began appointing ICANN Registrars. You can find a complete list of Registrars along with links to their registration tools at http://www.ICANN.org/registrars/accredited-list.html. The cost to register a domain name has come down a considerable amount and it is now possible to register them for as little as $5.95 a year.

Finding the Right Keywords

Just having a keyword domain name will not produce results, so you will need to obtain the best possible domain name keywords that you can. Finding a keyword domain name is as simple as visiting http://www.WordTracker.com. Word Tracker caches all of the search phrases used in the major search engines for a period of 60 days. You may visit the site, enter you keywords and it will tell you how many times the phrase is used on a daily basis. It will also rank the keywords by the amount of competition that there is on the Internet from sites using the same keywords. Finally, Word Tracker will rate the keywords assigning a KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) rating so that you can make a decision whether you should proceed or not.

Buying a Keyword Domain Name

If a suitable keyword domain name is not available for registration with an ICANN Registrar and you would like to acquire a specific one, there are several domain name brokers to search. igoldRush (http://www.iGoldRush.com) a site dedicated to the topic of registering, buying and selling domain names, list many of them with performance ratings that I would agree with (visit http://www.iGoldRush.com/links3.html) The two top brokers are Great Domains (http://www.GreatDomains.com) and AfterNIC.com (http://www.AfterNIC.com) Both offer hundreds of thousands of names for sale with searchable databases. A quick check of both brokers revealed hundreds of travel and cruise oriented domain names currently available.

Determining the Value for Keyword Domain Names
Some of the high profile sales of domain names have raised eyebrows and the imaginations of domain name investors. Until recently, there was no real way to determine the value of a keyword domain that had not established a track record of its ability to gain high search engine placement. With Pay-Per-Click performance marketing, it is easy to determine the potential productivity of a keyword domain name. By checking Overture’s (http://www.Overture.com) or Google’s AdWords (www.Google.com/AdWords.html) you can determine the current bid price for your keywords for sponsored links. By multiplying this price by the number of unique visitors found at Word Tracker, you can establish a reasonable idea of the value of the domain name. Of course, you would want to pay as little as possible, but you can certainly get an idea of the maximum you would expect to pay. So start having fun with domain names. Who knows, you just may be the next millionaire the Internet creates.