I’m not a big fan or English or Grammer. I find the rules anoying and restrictive. I am a lot more interested in ad copy and writing to sell. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to know a few things about words.

There are a lot of domain “investors” with absolutely horrendous portfolios. Lets call them domains that stink. If you visit the appraisal sections of domain forums (Domainstate, DNForum, NamePros) you’ll see a more than a few of them. I’d venture to guess stinky domains waiting to be appraised outnumber good domain names 20 to 1.

Here is my theory about what happens. A would be domain name investor reads an article in Business 2.0 or the Wall Street Journal. Thinking, wow, if Word.com sold for $1 million (totaly made up, not sure what it sold for) then ExcellentWord.com has to be worth more than the registration fee, right? And if thats so, what about 123word.com, abcword.com, eword.com, and valuableword.com?

Once and a while stinkers do make money, but its not often. Most of them used to be existing websites with real backlinks — that holds value to search engine optimizers reguardless of the domain name. If you can afford paying $6 a year for hundreds or thousands of domains, go ahead. If you are on a budget it pays to hold out for those needles in a very large haystack.

A general rule of thumb: If your domain name is a made up word or a phrase that no one uses, its value is questionable (with the exception of short .coms) Sometimes something as simple as making it plural can land your domain in this category (e.g. petmice.com vs petmices.com.)

Great domain deals are hard to find. When you do find one chances are high its going to be for 4 or 5 figures, not 2.