Good News and Bad News

The bad news first - not a single bid on SpecialEffects.TV today at Bido. There was a reserve, so that might have caused people to hesitate with putting in a bid, but with 40k exacts and a relevant extension, I would have expected at least one bid. I hope the upcoming auctions on Friday prove that the issue was really that the .TV extension is dead in the reseller market for right now. We'll see if having a reserve price is an almost immediate "no sale" at Bido. If that's the case, then there will be issues as I'm tired of selling names at $28. There will always be exceptions obviously, but with having to pay per reserve, there needs to be a fairly high chance that there will still be some bidding on the name for it to be worthwhile.

That said, I still enjoy being a bidder on Bido - I've won two domains in two days that I'm very happy about. I won them without competition and I wanted to discuss why these names were overlooked by other Bido bidders and why I like them.

SonomaCountyWine.com

This was one I actually "accelerated" by bidding on it while it had no votes (or maybe only 1). My initial bid ended up winning. Why did I bid on it? Well, for one thing, it is one of those odd domains that has more Google results when you add quotes (4 million results when you add the quotes, 1 million without quotes). That in itself intrigued me. But I don't usually care about number of results. I care about ads, searches, brand and development potential and this has it all. Sonoma County is synonymous with "Wine Country" in California. This generic covers local Wineries, the Wines themselves, and Wine Tours. When you add all 3 keyword combinations, there are a significant number of searches I'll be going after with this name. The only real downside is that the exact searches are under 500, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. A minisite is perfect for this though to see how well it ranks for various keywords and how much traffic it can generate.

SalsaBowls.com

Okay, you are probably wondering why I'm so happy about getting these names by now. Let's just say that I'm working on building up a nice stable of .com exact match domains. Particularly, I'm looking for around 1k exacts and with a clear product or market. And Salsa Bowls fits perfectly. The singular and plural combined total around 1.5k exact searches per month with a significant number of advertisers. While the product itself isn't necessary a high-priced item, customized team logos and more expensive materials like marble and ceramic can also raise the individual product price. The thing that really hooked me on this name is that Google only had 22k search results for the quoted term "Salsa Bowls" and the singular version was still under 90k. With only 22k search results, I can't imagine NOT ranking on the first page of the Google and Bing in very short order.

What's funny is that while Estibot apparently considers this a negative (as their valuation is very low), I am of the opinion that if there are advertisers and products and searches a plenty, having a low number of pages out there on the interwebs for my term is a positive thing. After some Googling of this idea, I ran across this interesting post on the very same topic that Elliot Silver put up over a year ago. I'm curious if his results have shown that he was right in his theory or not.

If you've had good results with this or have anecdotal evidence that having a larger number search results does matter, talk back at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain