Whilst valuable generic domains are hard to come by, it is still possible to uncover some gems using Amazon.com’s best sellers list along with the Google Adwords Keyword tool as a guide.

First, you have to select a category type that you want to browse. Preferably you should already know a lot about this area as it will help you select names more effectively. You can access a list of the various categories on the Amazon.com Bestsellers index page.

Ok let’s say that we want to find some electronics related domain names. Load up the selected category phase and begin to browse through the listings, making careful note of the titles and descriptions.

For example the first item I came across was the Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device. Now the reason I selected this was because I know that wireless reading devices are an emerging technology. There’s more chance that a generic name related to this type of technology will be available than for “mp3 players” which have been established on the market for years.

Let’s check to see if any of the .com’s related to this technology are available…

wirelessreadingdevice.com
wirelessreadingdevices.com
readingdevice.com
readingdevices.com

Nope. None of them were. If you ever run into such a dead end you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to search for alternatives. By entering in “wireless reading device” into the tool I was offered a huge list of alternatives.

It’s simply a case of searching through this list and checking to see if any of the domains are available. I’d recommend that you sort the list in descending order of “Advertiser Competition” as this is a good indicator that there are people out there who are targeting that specific keyphrase through a PPC campaign and may be potentially interested in buying the domain off of you.

If you are too lazy to search through the list and are a programmer, some of the larger registrar’s offer an API that will allow you to query the availability of a domain name automatically.

What to actually do when you find an available domain name

DON’T register it immediately. Instead check to see the “Advertiser Competition” rank of the keyword in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

The higher this value is, the better.

Also be sure to search for keyphrase in quotes in Google.

The more results that are returned, the better.

However it would be foolish to rely on these two criteria alone. I recommend storing a candidate list of your best domain names inside a spreadsheet, along with the information I mentioned above.

You’ll find that as you find more high quality names, some of the weaker keyphrases will drop off of the list. This is why it’s important not to dive straight in and register any old name.

So on Friday I invested $25 in some Stumbleupon Ads to promote my new religious social networking website, Relphy.

To be honest I wasn’t really expecting that much from the service as the site is currently a mess. Not forgetting that I was only paying $0.03 for a click. Also, feedback of the effectiveness of the service has been mixed across the web.

So how did my campaign work out?

Over the course of 12 hours the site used up it’s 500 Stumbles, receiving 15 thumbs-up and 7 thumbs-down attaining a 67% feedback ratio overall. Not bad.

However arguably the best thing about the campaign is that Relphy is continuing to receive traffic from Stumbleupon. Whether this will continue or not is another thing altogether. I’m currently receiving about 20-30 visits a day from Stumbleupon. Before the campaign this was more like 0-5 a day.

Am I cynical in thinking that Stumbleupon might filter the amount of free traffic going to your website just to ‘encourage’ you to invest more in their campaigns?

Probably.

Impressions

I’d tend to agree with Naffzinger in that the service works well because of its simplicity. It’s also strangely compelling watching the graphs move. If you’re anything like me you’ll spend hours on end refreshing the page.

Overall I think my campaign worked so well because the site wasn’t already popular with Stumbleupon users. I’d definitely recommend it to people who have just recently launched sites that have no presence in Stumbleupon.

If your site is already popular in Stumbleupon you might see more mixed results. Still, I think there are worse (and less fun) ways to invest $25 on promoting your site.

And I’m currently trying to integrate my blog properly into my website. At the minute my site is in quite a state but I’m gradually getting there.

My portfolio site is run off the CakePHP rapid development framework. It’s pretty cool all-in-all but I’m worried about it’s performance. Hopefully it doesn’t slow down too much just in case SOMEONE actually decided to visit the page.

Anyway I think that’s enough yammering for now. Back to work on the site.