If the snappy name isn’t a giveaway, the price will be.
The value of these premium domain names could range from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hot Tip:
If your ideal domain name is a premium, and you do not have the funds to purchase it, consider registering it with a different extension. Simply changing the extension could save you thousands of dollars AND still land you the domain name – win, win!
Where Do You Search to Check If a Domain Is Premium?
There are online marketplaces that provide the option of searching available domain names.
The steeper pricing of the premium domains will make them readily identifiable in the search results.
Godaddy.com and hover.com host such search engines.
How Do You Get a Premium Domain?
Before commencing the process of acquiring a premium domain, you need to check whether or not it currently has an owner.
The first step is to search for your desired domain URL to see if it is addressed to what’s known as a ‘parked’ web page.
Sometimes, when a website owner is no longer interested in hosting a website, they populate their home page with links (usually affiliate) or Adsense elements and forsake, or “park” their website.
This is a vain attempt at getting at least some value via advertisement revenue from what obviously is an abandoned website.
If you come across such a website, its great news for you – the website owner may consider selling you their domain name.
The first step will be to initiate contact with the website owner.
If the website has a contact form, you could initiate a conversation via a form submission.
If, however, there is no contact form, you will need to try to find the owners details via a domain directory such as whois.
Searching on WHOIS
Every domain is registered by a particular person or business. Those registration details are usually (not always) publically accessible via the online directory whois.
Whois also provides information such as domain expiration dates – which is very useful information for premium domain purchasing.
You do not need to worry about registrants providing false or misleading contact information; it is an offense under the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Doing so will result in one’s registration being canceled.
Some registrants of new websites purchase additional domain privacy protection in order to prevent their contact details being publicly available on whois.
When this is the case, you will see the name and contact details of the domain host on the whois record, or the words “Registration Private” rather than the details of the domain owner.
You can search on whois either online or right from your windows computer.
Searching on WHOIS online
To search online simply type “whois search” in Google and click on the first results (should be whois.icann.org).
When the webpage is opened you will see a search bar you can use to perform the search.
Here is an example of whois search results for the domain Microsoft.com
Here are the registrant contact details:
Figure 1: whois.icann.org
Here are the domain expiration details (note the creation date of the domain – 1991 wow!!!)
Figure 2: whois.icann.org
Searching On WHOIS Via Command Prompt
If you are feeling particularly geeky you can also search straight from your command prompt window.
The steps are as follows:
Step 1:
Download the whois.exe file which can be accessed here
You can also download and install the Sysinternals Suite from Windows which will include the whois.exe file.
Step 2:
Save the file in a memorable location – Desktop is best.
Step 3:
Open the command prompt terminal (if you can’t find it just search for “command prompt”
Step 4:
You will then need to set the command prompt directory to the folder you saved the whois.exe file in (let’s assume it is the desktop).
If you are running Windows 10, type the following:
cd C:\Users\username\desktop
If you are running Windows 7, type the following:
cd C:\Users\admin\desktop
Step 5:
You can now perform the whois search.
Type in your query in the following format:
whois domain.com
If you are running a 64-bit you would need to type:
Whois64 domain.com
So, for example, if you wanted to perform a WHOIS search for Microsoft.com and you were using a 32-bit system, you would type the following:
whois www.microsoft.com
Here is an example of whois data for the domain techjunkie.com
Figure 3: techjunkie.com
Now let’s discuss the process of negotiating for your preferred premium domain.
The process of negotiation is difficult and highly delicate – you could scare the domain owner off if you’re not careful!
If you are not experienced in this field we highly recommend that you leave it up to the professionals that specialize in domain buy service (more on that later).