IDN On Steroids

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2008 ProfitswithChris.com

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2008 ProfitsWithChris.com www.ProfitsWithChris.com
http://www.profitswithchris.com/http://www.profitswithchris.com/


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Disclaimer

This publication is purely for general informational purposes. I have made bestefforts to prepare this publication but I take no responsibility or liability for youractions that you take or for any consequences after reading this publication.

Furthermore, I make no warranties or representations concerning the accuracyor completeness of this publication. By reading this publication you understandthat you are responsible for your own actions. Under no circumstances shall I beheld liable for any losses or damages you incur after reading this publication. Useof this publication is at your own risk.

This publication is subject to international copyright law and cannot be copied orreproduced in any way whatsoever except that specified below. It also cannotbe sold for money.

However, it can be freely given away. So you can email this document to othersand you can host the file on your own site and make it available for download.

You can even use for your own mailing list and require people to subscribebefore they can get this publication. You can also offer this publication for freedownload on your paid or free membership sites. You can also offer thispublication as a free bonus accompanying a paid product.

Just remember, you cannot sell this publication on it's own for any sum ofmoney. Also, you cannot edit or rebrand this publication this publication mustremain totally unmodified.

I do not make any guarantees or claims for your performance or results.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................................5

WHAT ARE IDNS?........................................................................................................................................6

WHAT ARE IDNS AND WHY SHOULD I CARE?..................................................................................................6

IDN.TLD......................................................................................................................................................7

CURRENT IDN TRENDS.............................................................................................................................9

MAJORCOUNTRIES WHERE CONSUMERS ARE ADOPTING IDNS...........................................................................10

WHY ARE IDNS GOOD FORINTERNET MARKETERS?........................................................................................10

SO WHY ARENT THE MAINSTREAM DOMAIN COMMUNITY GOING NUTS FORIDNS?...........................................11

IDN TESTING PHASE AND EVOLUTIONS WITH ICANN....................................................................................12

HOW YOU CAN EARN MONEY WITH IDNS.......................................................................................15

CAPITAL GAINS.............................................................................................................................................15

PARKING.......................................................................................................................................................16

SO HOW DO IDNS WORK IN PRACTICE?...........................................................................................20

TECHNICALITIES .............................................................................................................................................20

TYPES OF IDN.............................................................................................................................................26

COUNTRIES....................................................................................................................................................26

SYMBOL IDNS..............................................................................................................................................31

STRANGE TLDS............................................................................................................................................31

STRATEGIES FOR FINDING IDNS........................................................................................................32

APPRAISAL....................................................................................................................................................32

NEW REGISTRATIONS......................................................................................................................................34

SECONDARY MARKET.....................................................................................................................................36

OVERALL INVESTMENT STRATEGIES..............................................................................................38

DIVERSIFICATION............................................................................................................................................38

COVER YOURREG FEES.................................................................................................................................38

A GOOD BEGINNERS STRATEGY.....................................................................................................................39

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF THE IDN MARKET.......................................................................40

THE NAYSAYERSAND DOOMMONGERS..............................................................................................................40

THE ACTIVE IDN COMMUNITY.......................................................................................................................40

DOMAIN TASTING...........................................................................................................................................40

TRADEMARKS................................................................................................................................................41

DEVELOPING IDN SITES.........................................................................................................................42

HOSTING WITH IDNS....................................................................................................................................42

SELLING IDNS............................................................................................................................................43

TOOLS AND RESOURCES.......................................................................................................................45

WHAT FUTURE CAN WE SEE FOR IDNS?..........................................................................................47

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WHY FEBRUARY 12 ISAN IMPORTANT DATE.....................................................................................................47

IDN.IDN....................................................................................................................................................47

STAY ABREASTOF LANDRUSHES......................................................................................................................48

FINAL THOUGHTS....................................................................................................................................49

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Introduction

Hi and congratulations on downloading this guide and opening your mind to theworld of IDNs. I know that you will find great value in this guide.

When it comes to IDNs, I missed the first boat (actually I grabbed a few morcelsthat are now worth a few thousand dollars at todays market price), but thesecond, third and fourth boats are still moored in the harbour and you can stilltake advantage of that.

This book is about getting you up to speed on a.s.a.p. on IDN and their hugepotential for you - whether you want to play the speculation game or even usefor internet marketing purposes.

As well as this book, I have also created a 50 minute video that shows mefinding IDNs, as well as a spreadsheet that accompanies the video. You candownload both from either of these 2 sites (use the other if one does not workfor you): Main Download Link,Alternative Download Link.

Oh, one other thing - think of this guide as just that - a "guide" or "primer" tothe world of IDN. I don't profess to be the leading expert on IDNs but I have nodoubt that this guide will get you up and running very quickly. Like with mostthings in life, "knowledge is power", and I encourage you to learn more andmore. I have included a list near the end of many additional resources that youshould check out.

I really hope you enjoy reading this guide and any comments, feedback orquestions that you have - please hit me up at:

Thanks

Chris SmithProfitswithChris.com

PS This book will no doubt be updated in future and you can always grab thelatest version here: IDN On Steroids Latest Version.

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What are IDNs?

What Are IDNs And Why Should I Care?

Lets start with the basics - what are IDNs anyway?

I'm sure you know what a domain name is (by the way, to save typing, I'm justgoing to call them "domains" from now on).

IDN stands for Internationalized Domain Name. As you can tell from thisphrase, they are intended to provide a superior quality of domain for the entireworld to use.

Now, think about domains and the way they work at the moment - they're all inEnglish!

Picture yourself as a person living in the country of China (you can easily replaceChina with any other country). Like your fellow countrymen, you enjoy using theinternet for work and pleasure.

You have several favourite sites and enjoy reading about news, sports and yourother hobbies. Of course, all the sites that you read are displayed in Chinesecharacters, it's your mother tongue and the language you prefer why wouldyou want it any other way?

You know a bit of English because you used to watch quite a lot of Englishlanguage TV programs and movies although there are many more Chinesebroadcasts that are available nowadays.

But for some reason, domains are still type in English. Like the most popular sitein China, for example, http://www.baidu.com.

It seems strange to you that you still have to type website names in English.

Everything else you do on the computer is in Chinese, of course, whether itswriting emails to your friends and business associates, typing in search queries,posting on forums etc. I wonder why no one has created Chinese domains yet?

Now, don't you get it and see the HUGE possibility of IDNs? Why on earthwould a local want to type domains in the English language? The only reason

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they do is because that is the way the internet was invented, way back when.

Luckily, Mr. Lee in China or Miss Bilal in Saudia Arabia have no need to befrustrated anymore. They are now able to type domains in their local language,thanks to IDN.

IDN.TLD

So, how do you write an IDN?

With IDNs, you can type the localised characters in front of the dot. So if youtake the Japanese market as an example, these are examples of IDNs:

.jp.com

.net

As you can see, the characters come before the dot.

After the dot are what are known in the domain world as the extensions or TLDs(top level domains).

TLDs come in two types:

gTLDs are global TLDs that do not give any meaning of location orcountry e.g. .com, .net, .biz etc.

ccTLDs are country code TLDs that are specific to a country e.g. .jp,.co.uk, .de etc. These often cost more for you to buy than a gTLD andsometimes you even need to satisfy special conditions like residency.

The main thing to remember is that TLDs and extensions are the same thing.

"But they still have to type the extensions in English," I hear you say.

Yes, you are correct, there is currently no real way to have the whole domainincluding the extension in local language. But you can see that this is not aproblem at the moment for 2 reasons:

1) The market value of IDNs has risen and consumers are adopting then in spiteof this feature.

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2) There are plans well under way by ICANN (like a governing body of thetechnical integration of domains) to convert the English extensions into theirlocal language equivalents within the next few years.

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Current IDN Trends

I hope that you now see the power of IDNs. When you think about the conceptof IDNs, it seems so logical and simple doesn't it?

Back in around 2003/4, not long after they first came out, there werent evenany forums for IDNs and people on the regular domain forums hardly evermentioned IDNs.

I was lucky to come across a few other speculators who told me about IDNs.

To me it seemed so logical - of course people want to type using their ownlanguage.

I was ready to invest a little cash and had a punt on a few domains. I didn't goin guns blazing.

What stopped me from investing more money was that killer of men - self doubt.

I thought - surely this is too good to be true? Why are the mainstream domainspeculators not getting into this? Better to be safe rather than sorry.

With the benefit of hindsight, I could not have been more wrong.

I wish I had invested more now because I would be a millionaire now! Yes, I

know many investors by name who are now sitting on several millions ofdollars of virtual real estate at current market values. And they could sellup all of it today if they wanted to but why should they if prices are going to goup even further?

IDNs are no longer some kind of black magic. They are a reality and no longer intheir infancy. If you think of a product life cycle curve (not the best analogy butit will do), then IDNs have passed stage 1 which is the infancy of the product.

They are now at the stage where they are already profitable and growth is

increasing every year. All the ships have not yet left the harbour so GET INNOW!

In this section, I'm going to tell you about the current IDN situation so you canget up to speed on the market and where the current opportunities are.

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Major Countries Where Consumers Are Adopting IDNs

IDNs can be used all over the world. Think about it - every country that has

characters that aren't in your standard A-Z alphabet can and wants to use IDNs.

I'm going to tell you shortly in more detail about the individual country wherethere has been the biggest growth but here is just a snapshot of where we are:

Russia is doing the best by far in terms of combined consumer adoptionand traffic. The Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet and have really taken toheart the idea of using local language for domains.

Japan - IDNs are gaining a foothold in several East Asian countries but by

far, Japan is doing the best. IDN.jp domains (IDN domains with a .jpextension) are getting traffic and being actively branded to the massmarkets. This would be even higher if not for some minor technicaldelays.

Roman character countries where their alphabet is similar to the Englishalphabet except for accents and a few extra characters are doing very welland show some of the most frequent and largest domain sales in thesecondary market e.g. Germany, Spain, France.

Other countries are showing varying levels of adoption and popularity

depending on a number of technical factors and country specific factors.The trend in all of them though is resoundingly UPWARDS.

Why Are IDNs Good For Internet Marketers?

Its not only domain speculators who can benefit from IDNs. So can internetmarketers!

I want to show you in this guide how IDNs are already becoming valuable andare going to increase in value to even higher levels in future.

As a domain speculator, you can buy them for (a) gains or for (b) future income,but there are also incredible opportunities for internet marketers.

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I know that most internet marketers want to get a piece of the action in rapidlygrowing overseas economies such as China and India and a few already have.

Let's look at some stats that were recently published in the NY Times aboutChina alone:

over 210 million internet users. only 16% of the population is online!! only 5 millions users away from being the world's largest internet

community.

Now, for branding purposes alone, are you telling me thatYOU can afford toignore IDNs? I think not!

The other thing you should know is that search engines are already giving SEOvalue to IDNs. If you think about it, it's totally logical to do that. They havealways given SEO value to regular domains that are related to the contenthosted on them so its no surprise that you can get the same SEO benefit with anIDN.

So Why Arent The Mainstream Domain Community GoingNuts For IDNs?

Some of you may be asking - why haven't the mainstream domain community

fallen head over heels in love with IDNs?

Actually, they are starting to, and you are now seeing more and more of themtalk about IDNs and more and more mainstream speculators are investing inthem.

But there are two things I think you should know:

First of all, the mainstream domain community seemed to have blinkerson when IDNs first came out and just ignored them, if they had even

heard of them. Probably it didnt help that they just seemed to "appear"without much fanfare or education at all from ICANN. And those who hadheard of them thought they were "too good to be true" as an investment.Typical fear of the unknown so Ill follow the herd mentality. Even thoughI, myself, punted on a few (which are now worth several thousanddollars), most people did not.

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Secondly, you have to remember that IDNs are still at a very early stage.The major issues that you see around are not in getting consumers to likethem. Hell no, consumers seem to love them! Nope, the major hurdleshave been technical ones such as browser support. As these hurdles drop,

one by one, you can see that IDNs are getting more and more popularand I personally believe that they are on the cusp of exploding (read whatI have to say about IE7 later on).

IDN Testing Phase And Evolutions With ICANN

As I mentioned earlier, you can see that IDNs have been a technical evolutionsince they first came out.

It's not like your regular traditional domains where, say they want to add anextension it is pretty easy from a technical perspective to just bolt on supportfor .info or .ws extensions.

In layman's terms, the "design of the internet" has had to change to allow IDNsto work. And it will continue to change in future too, to allow IDN.IDN domains

to exist where the full domain is in local characters (e.g.. instead of

.kr).

This is all being organised by ICANN who have various working groups and test

periods for each small change. Because the internet is so big and so manypeople use it, you cant just go WHAM BAM with a huge update!

They have to roll these changes out slowly and bit by bit. They don't want to betoo hasty and risk bringing down DNS and websites no longer working becauseof it.

You can think of it as like a huge steam roller on a track of road. Slowly butsurely and carefully, it is getting from A to B. Not only that, but nothing canget in its way to stop it reaching its destination!

IDN.IDN

I touched on this briefly before. IDN.IDN is when the full domain will be written

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in local characters.

It hasn't happened yet but plans are fully underway countries and theirgovernments want it to happen.

From a layman's point of view it sounds easy to do - surely just repeat theprocess you used to get the local characters before the "dot"?

The reality is that it is a slightly different technical challenge. But the differentcountries have a strong desire for this to happen and plans are fully underway byICANN to implement it (remember that steamroller analogy I made).

There is much support from all over the world. Here's is just one example quotethat I got from the ICANN website:

On behalf of the Korean Government, I would like to submit writtencomments on the implementation of Internationalized Top Level Domains(IDN TLDs).

The Korean government supports the diligent and responsible introductionofIDN TLDs, based on the respect of culture, heritage and diversity. IDNTLDswill radically improve the end-user experience and have a significantinfluence on the management of internet name resources in Korea.

Sincerely yours,

Jaeyoun KimNational Internet Development Agency of Korea

And you know what they say: "where there's a will, there's a way".

The only question remaining is, what happens if youve already got an IDN.comor IDN.net or whatever? Will you automatically get the local equivalentextension? Or will you be left high and dry?

All the current talk is that these will be converted over. Think about it - do youthink ICANN would risk leaving people who have invested millions of dollars intoa domain plus branding? Do you think the countries want this for thoseinvestors? The conversion is inevitable in my view and the rising market valuesreflect this.

What you must understand about ICANN is that, as an organisation, they are

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pretty damn good. There is no infighting, no talk from governments that they aregoing to abandon ICANN and go their own way, nothing like that. I take my hatoff them for their ability to navigate not only the technical hurdles of IDN butalso the political hurdles.

If nothing else, listen to what the market is saying. Look at what consumers arestarting to do. IDNs used to be the preserve of overseas speculators and nowlocals are buying them up in droves! Look at the market price this reflects theconfidence of the market.

By the way, this IDN.IDN phenomenon is only a challenge for those countriesthat don't use the English alphabet. Whereas, if you think about a county likeGermany, then it has never had a problem with its extensions in the first placeand so is "fully IDN" already, probably one reason for the high value andnumerous sales of German IDN (there are no accents in .de so no need tochange anything).

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How You Can Earn Money With IDNs

Naturally, we are into IDNs because we want to make money! Although ofcourse, as I touched on earlier, there is also the indirect value you can get thatcomes from the fantastic SEO possibilities of IDN as well as its branding qualities(see section later called Developing IDN Sites).

But when it comes to pure domain speculation, there are basically twowaysof getting money from domains: income and capital gains.

If you think about it, this is pretty similar to owning shares in a company. Somepeople are like traders and are in it to buy low and sell high.

Whereas others are in it for the long term and also look for a good regular

income (like a dividend) for income purposes.

Capital Gains

Most people are into IDNs for the capital gains.

The greatest beauty of all domains is hand registering a domain for $8 orwhatever and selling it for thousands at a later date. I can't think of any otherinvestment that gives such a great ROI (return on investment), can you?

It may stink of get rich quick but there are many people making a living in thisway. Their work comes down to thinking outside of the box and playing it smartrather than working their butts off.

Those days in regular domains (roman characters) are almost all over. It is verydifficult to make money from hand registering your own domains and sellingthem after they increase in value. Maybe you have tried yourself? I have done itbut it has been very hit and miss, personally speaking.

But the beauty of IDNs is the unchartered territory. There are so many regulardomains whose foreign equivalents are not yet taken. This is like winding theclock backwith regular domains! Its like that movie, Far and Away with TomCruise and Nicole Kidman where they go out and stake some land as their own!In fact, the phrase landrush is also a domaining term for when a new type ofdomain is released on the market.

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You might think that these foreign markets are smaller but this is not always thecase - remember those stats for China? Pretty soon, it may be that the Chinesemarket will overtake the English one, to quote just one example. What do youthink will happen when their incomes levels rival those in the western world? The

mind boggles!

But its not just all about hand regging. You can also make a lot of money out ofthe secondary market as well and buy from people who want to sell. Again, thebeauty of IDNs is that, because it is a less established market so far, somepeople are letting go of domains for far less than they should. There are bargainsgalore and I'll expand on that later in this guide.

In fact, when I touch on strategy later on, youll see why you must get yourfingers into the secondary market as well if you want to be a serious with IDNs.

Past IDN Sales

Still don't believe in the power of IDNs? Then take a look at some of thesereported sales in the secondary market, as taken from DNJournal, the top dog ofdomain industry news.

rzte.de ("medical profession" in German) $79,309Ernhrung.de ("nutrition" in German) $33,992

Singlebrse.de (typo of "singles exchange" in German) $15,569Stdtereisen.de ("city travel" in German) $60,168

.net ("Tokyo" in Japanese) $10,000

.com ("hand phone" in Korean) $42,250

Also you should bear in mind that the secondary market for domains is nowherenear as efficient as the stock market so some of these valuations are grosslyunder what I reckon they should have gone for.

Parking

The other main way that you can make money from IDNs (and all domains ingeneral) is from "parking". This is when, instead of pointing your domain to yourhost like you might normally do, you point to the nameservers (or do a URL

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forward) of a company who provide clickable ads and you are paid per click.

Its called parking because its like parking your car. When you dont use yourcar, you park it. It would be nice to get some income for nothing wouldnt it?

It's an easy way to generate money if you know that the domain is getting traffic- and there are a couple of ways of getting traffic which I will get to in the nextsection.

But what about parking? How does it work?

Parking provides relevant ads so your Joe Surfer who is visiting your domainmight find nothing but a parking page but hopefully he will still find a useful linkand click on it.

Heres an example. Im sure youve seen a parked page before but maybe youdidnt know it.

Check out this link: http://www.sedoparking.com/warriorforum.com

Look familiar?

The problem with parking is that the ads or content served are not verytargetted. The best that you can do is choose a category that is closest to whatyou think your visitors will be looking for.

Or the parker will do its best to serve you up related ads based on the domainname. If you look at that example link then its serving up ads for IndianWarrior Figures!

In my opinion, an internet marketer with a bit of capital could make a killing byoffering better parking facilities that offer more than just a category and autodetection and give domain speculators much better click through rates. Can you

just imagine if even someone like Google moved in on the parking sceneknowing what they are capable of with Adwords and Adsense.

But why do people park anyway? You see, domain speculators don't like to waste(in their eyes) time developing sites and making better targetted pages whenthey could use that time to look for more domains. Many of them are a verytechnical and scientific breed and winning with domains is about playing smartand looking for more opportunities.

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In fact, it would cost them hardly anything to outsource some basic mini sitedevelopment but the fact remains that hardly any of them do.

Also, many of these parking companies leverage their resources and also offerthe ability to act as domain broker for you in return for a commission.

I have included a big list of parking companies in the tools and resources sectionbut here are the main big players:

NameDrive (most popular for IDNs, this is my recommendation for mostof your IDNs)

Domainhop one of the earliest to provide IDN support Sedo

Type In Traffic

So how do your domains and your IDNs in particular get traffic? Especially forIDNs, 99% of the traffic currently is coming from type ins.

What this means is that when you buy a domain and you find that it is gettinghits from seemingly nowhere, what is actually happening is that surfers are justtyping in www..com in the browser.

Yes, believe it or not, many surfers actually do search for stuff by typing it into

the address bar! It may be a tiny minority of all users but extrapolate it to aglobal scale and it is significant.

You can also get traffic from typo domains e.g. warriorforun.com etc. These areeasy to spot for IDNs with roman alphabets such as German ones (there haveeven been some big German IDN typo sales already) but much harder to spot forother languages e.g. East Asian languages, unless you are a native speaker andknow the grammar of the language well.

Inbound Links

The other way that a domain might already have some traffic is through inboundlinks such as for a domain that used to be a website. For regular domains this isquite common - people pick up "dropped domains" all the time for this kind of

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traffic.

In fact, heres a tip, some people buy these expired or dropped domains becausethe traffic can be highly targeted to their niche and cheaper than PPC.

With IDNs, because they are so new, there are very few established sites thathave already dropped. Naturally, early adopters of IDN don't want to let go oftheir sites at this stage and have plans for them.

Therefore this type of traffic for IDNs is pretty much non-existant and youshouldnt bother looking for it.

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So How Do IDNs Work In Practice?

Enough of why you might want an IDN - it's pretty obvious isn't it? To makesome money! Now let's see how they work in practice.

Technicalities

As I mentioned earlier, IDN is really a technical implementation allowing thiswonderful localisation of domains in the internet.

What this means for you is a whole new set of rules. You probably alreadyknow how to register a regular domain at Godaddy or Namecheap and actually,

the process for an IDN is not too different.

But you do need to know about some important technical differences.

What Is Unicode And Punycode

The internet was invented before IDN so in order to get IDN working, it has to"piggyback" some existing technical principles.

The first of these that you need to know is character encoding. Maybe youknow a little about this already - e.g. in your browser when you go to a foreignwebsite it looks like a bunch of blocks of characters. So you have to change thecharacter encoding to get it to look normal.

By the way, if you can't view some languages at the moment and it just looks like amess then you might need to install the appropriate language pack for your operatingsystem. For Vista and XP, you can do this by going to Control Panel and thenRegional and Language Options where you can add additional languages.

Now as we already know, by default, the internet doesn't like domains withanything except a-z and numbers. So how can we suddenly get it to understandforeign characters?

The answer is something called unicode to punycode translation. Soundsbizarre you probably think, but it's really simple if I show you an example:

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If you typed the Latvian domain http://tdali.lvinto an internet browser 5 yearsago then nothing would have happened. This is called the unicode form.

Recent browsers such as Firefox and IE7 will take this domain and translate it to

this:http://xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv. This is called the punycode form.

The internet structure as it stands today - everything in it, DNS servers etc. allunderstand the second form (punycode). There are no special characters sonothing gets confused.

As long as your internet browser is able to translate a domain in punycodeform to unicode form, then you can use IDNs. Thats right the translationhappens at the browser level.

This is also a major factor in getting IDNs out to the masses and I'll cover this

very shortly later in this guide.

By the way, don't worry about how you can type a Chinese or Russian characteron your keyboard. You'll never need to know because most of the time whenyou're looking for IDNs, you'll just be copying and pasting from the web.

I've never manually typed one of these characters and never needed to, and alocal would have a specially labelled keyboard. Because you only need totranslate and never need to write from scratch then this doesn't matter.

Ascii Domains

Domain speculators like to differentiate between IDNs and other domains. Up tillnow, I've called these other domains "regular" or "traditional" domains.

From now on, we can call them "ascii domains". This is what IDNers like to callthem and the name comes from a very old character set very similar to the oneon a standard English keyboard, which is all you need to type these older styledomains.

Registering An IDN

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Naturally, you'll want to score some fresh registrations if possible as these costpractically nothing and you could get some amazing ROI.

The process is pretty similar when you compare it to ascii domains.

In the area of domain speculation, your biggest costs (or your only cost if youdon't outsource any development or research) are registration and renewalfees.

So I advise you to shop around depending on which TLD/ccTLD you are buyingas the prices will vary quite a lot.

Also, a registrar might have a great first time registration price but then they lockyou in and renewals are expensive. You probably have seen this before with asciidomains.

Another thing its worth registering where other IDN speculators register theirdomains for 3 reasons:

probably offers value for money these registrars know their customers (IDN speculators) and what they

want easier to push or transfer a domain between buyer and seller when both

have an account at the same registrar.

I've included a big list of registrars in the tools and resources section near the

end of this guide but here are the big hitters and I recommend you open anaccount now with all of them because you will need it later.

Dynadot newer kid on the block but a very good interface and hasquickly gained popularity. If you want to help me out, please enter thecode 7r8i8Q06u6k8x6s into the refer-a-friend box at the bottom ofthe application form.

DomainSite very experienced IDN registrar. eNom

The other thing for you to note is that when you want to register an IDN, you

simply input the local or unicode version (e.g. .com) and the registrarwill automatically do the conversion to punycode as necessary and tell you if thedomain is free or registered.

And dont forget - there is also always a language drop down list to choose from.

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It might seem strange that you need to select a language when you think itshould be obvious but I have heard of problems if you don't select it so Irecommend you do this simple step.

Market Divisions And Technical Characteristics

There are a few main IDN markets with common characteristics and in thissection I'll tell you briefly about each one.

These are minor and there is even more variation when you drill down muchfurther to, say, the country level.

Roman Language Domains

First of all you have domains using mostly roman characters. What I mean hereare those domains with characters mostly on your keyboard and maybe the oddaccent of two. So, for example, German, French and Spanish would come intothis category.

These don't suffer from the problems of needing an IDN TLD as their TLDs canalready be typed easily with a standard English keyboard e.g. ".de"

Already there have been many large IDN sales in Germany for domains in the

form IDN.de.

As many regular domain speculators already know, .de is, along with .co.uk andothers, one of the most highly developed markets for domain speculation interms of trading and big ticket sales. So it's not a surprise when you see thistype of activity for IDN.de so soon.

The great thing is that a person might think that the Germans would not get toothrilled about the addition of an umlaut to their range of possible domains e.g.www.mchte.de instead of www.mochte.de.

Well, the reality is that the market has taken to these very well and surfers arevoting with their key presses and prefer to get as close to their native languageas possible.

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Non-Roman Language Domains

Non-roman markets have attracted more interest from IDN investors probablybecause they offer many more possibilities (the whole language as opposed to

just a few words).

Not only will these markets probably abandon most of their English domains overtime but also each market within this group is very different and presentsdifferent opportunities.

For example, the Chinese market versus the Arabic market. As you can guess,they don't exactly have similar cultures. The differences in languages also meanthat you have to sometimes take a different approach when looking for freedomains to register.

I'll cover these markets in greater detail in the next few sections.

Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)

One of the earliest technical hurdles for IDN to overcome was good browsersupport.

Remember the steamroller analogy - it may be slow moving but it will get therebecause the will is there!

For IDN to work, we know that the browser needs to be able to translate frompunycode to unicode.

If most of the world types in an IDN and nothing happens then IDN can never bea success.

Firefox has had this ability for some time but back when I first looked into IDNsin around 2003, IE did not support it (I think we were on version 5 then). In fact,I had to install some Verisign plugins to get it to work.

Because most of the world uses IE (even today), then getting IE to translatepunycode to unicode was essential. It took some time, but eventually thatsupport is now here within IE7.

Now the problem is, much of the world is not yet using IE7. In East Asia

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especially (with huge markets such as Japan, Korea and China) many are notusing IE7 which I think is due to technical delays from Microsoft with IE7 autoupdating.

Places like Russia have a much higher number of people on IE7 and this is one

reason why IDNs have exploded there.

Now the magic date to put in your calendar is February 12th. This is when weexpect that IE7 will be rolled out to the entire world on an auto update and youshould see an acceleration in demand for IDN (and thus prices too).

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Types of IDN

OK, now it's time to learn about the different types of IDNs. Apart from IDNs fordifferent countries there are even other IDNs such as symbols.

Countries

Every country is unique when it comes to IDN. Even for ascii domains, differentwords have different popularities in different countries.

In IDN it gets even more complex. Some countries prefer to use ccTLD ratherthan gTLD for instance (e.g. .jp instead of.com).

Also, you have the problem of translation. Believe it or not, an online dictionaryis pretty good for most uses. But sometimes there are problems with grammarthat you need to be cautious of when registering a domain or buying one fromsomeone.

Many times I have seen someone proudly say they have bought a top dictionaryword generic IDN in a hot market. Obviously, the original one went ages ago butmaybe the chap has picked up an alternative name that is hardly ever used orsomething similar.

And you should beware of scammers who try to present you a fantasticopportunity. I have not heard of this going on but Im sure there are a few.

Japanese IDNs

The Japanese market has, until recently, been the shining star in the portfolio ofIDN investors and has been surpassed recently by Russia, and that is onlybecause of IDN penetration in that country.

Basically, the Japanese market seem to love IDNs and they are being branded inoffline media, in subway train advertising space, for example. Japanese are wellknown for embracing new technology and you can see that IDN has been nodifferent.

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Big companies are also pushing IDN. For example, Nissan is featuring its IDNdomain in its recent commercials.

And don't forget that IDNs also work in many mobile browsers, which is animportant market in Japan.

The other thing to note is that Japanese prefer IDN.jp (ccTLD) domains ratherthan IDN.com and other gTLD domains.

Chinese IDNs

The Chinese market is obviously incredible important. I posted some stats earlybut did I really need to? Surely you already know the MASSIVE potential inChina. Obviously then, Chinese domains are better than gold.

Compared to Japan, the traffic is not yet as high and they have yet to gain asstrong a foothold with surfers.

The main domains of interest are IDN.com and IDN.cn but to register the .cnyou also need to be a local so this is ruled out for many people.

The other thing that you should know is that the Chinese use two styles ofwriting - one is called simplified and the other is traditional. The first is usedmainly in China and the second is used mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong -

something to bear in mind.

There is some uncertainty about what will happen if you already hold existingIDN.com and IDN.net domains because China already has its own versions whichare fully IDN (that is IDN.IDN). However, these don't comply with ICANN and area domestic "fudge" so it is thought if you currently have IDN.com and IDN.net,then you will eventually get the local language equivalents and the existing

fudges will get a lower subset of domain.

It's all about politics and negotiations but, at the end of the day, look at themarket prices of IDN.com and IDN.net Chinese domains. They have gone up andare considered premium. The market does not see any danger at the moment orin the future - otherwise they would be worthless.

And remember, jurisdiction over ".com" the world's leading TLD, is with the USAand not China. This is the case for all countries which is another reason why

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.com is so highly sought after.

Russian IDNs

The Russian market is the best of all IDN markets at the moment. This isbecause a lot of people are on IE7 and they are just lapping up being able totype domains in their own language.

Unfortunately for you and I, this means that most of the good dictionary wordgeneric IDN domains are gone but there are still bargains to be found on thesecondary market.

One of the more famous sales in recent times was for .com(Moscow.com) which sold for a meagre $16,000. Remember, that's at today'sprices. Who knows what it will be worth a few years from now.

At the moment, only IDN.com is available. There is no such thing currently asIDN.ru. This is probably a good thing as it means that your Russian IDN.comdomains are under jurisdiction of the USA and not Russia.

It also looks like Russians want IDN.IDN for the future such as IDN.. Keepyour eyes peeled for the landrush.

This is an example of a government not even wanting to use their existing ccTLD

(.ru) for IDN, they want to go straight to IDN.IDN.

If that's not a great push for IDN then I don't know what is!

Arabic IDNs

Arabic domains have incredible potential due to the sheer number of countriesthat it is spoken in. Can you imagine getting traffic from Morocco, Algeria,

Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, UAE, Lebanon and many,many more! According to Wikipedia, there are up to half a billion Arabic speakersin the world.

Again, because Arabic IDNs have been available for some years, many premiumdictionary generic words have gone but there are still second tier domains

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available that will have value in the future.

The secondary market for Arabic IDNs is also very active and such dictionarygenerics can be picked up even for as low as less than $100.

German IDNs

The German market is well established. This means that all the good IDN.dewere taken a long time ago. Also remember that most German words don't useaccent or umlauts so the supply of German IDNs was very low to begin with.

You may still be able to find some good IDN.com domains but a lot of IDNinvestors ignore the German market because it doesn't offer the potential anddiversity compared to emerging markets, for instance.

Korean IDNs

Korea is a well established market for domain names. In fact, there are evenmore domains registered there (per head) compared to Japan.

Most of the good IDN.com domains have gone so you may find some on thesecondary market. IDN.net domains are valued less highly but you may get

better pickings there.

To get IDN.kr domains you need a local contact address so either you need to beKorean or have a local agent. Like with most ccTLDs this is an expensiveprocess, although not impossible.

Perhaps one area that is worth you looking into is IDN.biz which were onlyreleased last year.

The problem with .biz is that they are considered third or fourth rate ccTLDs, at

least in the established ascii domain market. But Koreans have adopted IDNswith a great ferocity so who knows what they might be worth in the future?Some people also say that .biz are a lot more popular in Asia compared to thewest. It may also be worth checking out IDN.info too.

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Hindi IDNs

India is one of those markets that you see and cannot ignore at first glance.Although Indians speak many languages, there are perhaps up to 400 millionnative Hindi speakers and 120 million who speak it as a second language.

We all know how quickly India, like China, is evolving and its people arebecoming more wealthy and affluent so this market is important in terms of IDN.

However, there is a perception amongst some that, because most Indianscurrently use English to navigate the internet (Indians have excellent levels ofEnglish education and many western companies outsource 1st line call centres toIndia), that they will not change to use Hindi in future.

If you believe in a future of Hindi IDNs then that means that there are quite a

few bargains to be had in the secondary market. The only caveat is that theseare long term investments compared to other IDNs so don't expect to flip themanytime soon.

Emerging Markets

There are many emerging markets out there that are experiencing rapid growthin number of internet users and where you can find much more IDN gold as theyhave not yet been plundered by domain speculators to the same extent as other

countries like Japan.

If you are new to IDN, then this is where you can find most of the hand regpickings.

There are too many to list but here are a few promising ones:

Vietnam Hungary Azerbaijan

Hungary Poland

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Symbol IDNs

Remember that Wingdings font that you played around with in Word? Well,believe it or not but you can have a domain like .com (yes, thats a picture of a phone!!)

.com translates to http://xn--y3h.com and you can see that the person whoowns this domain is showing phone related products!

It's brandable for sure but I can't see anyone typing that into their browser!

Most of these (the IDN crowd call them "dingbats" although Dingbats areactually a subset of Wingdings click here if you really want more info!) areprobably useless but there are a few that can even be typed in that might fetchsomething in future.

My advice is to not even bother trying to register these or buy from someone inthe secondary market. They are strictly for novelty value!

Strange TLDs

There are a bunch of other TLDs that you can register such as .cc, .biz, .ws, .tv.

These only have limited popularity even for regular ascii domains so the currentmarket value for IDN versions is even lower. It is debatable whether you willever be able to sell these for a decent price although in some parts of Asia thereare some companies using .biz, for instance.

In my opinion, it's better to go after a younger market and stick with .com, .netor ccTLD instead (country specific) maybe .info at a push.

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Strategies For Finding IDNs

There are basically two ways of getting any domain, whether it is IDN or not.

One if to find a name that is not currently registered with anyone and the otheris to buy from someone else who can transfer ownership. But we also need away to value domains as well before deciding to part with our cash.

Appraisal

You can't choose a name without knowing what it is worth. Probably you havebought an ascii domain in the past and thought it was great until someone

pointed out to you that it was worthless!

This is where we need to develop good appraisal skills and in IDN it is muchmore complex. But remember, where there are greater barriers to entry andmore difficulties, there is usually also more gold!

Overture

We can appraise a domain's value by gut feel but there are very few substitutesto real quantitative data.

The best data that exists is Overture (although it is an extremely slow site!). Ifyou are an internet marketer then you probably already know all about Overturealready. Well, this data also exists for many other markets such as Japan andChina.

In case you're not familiar with Overture, it's a system where you type a phrase and itshows the number of people who searched for that phrase in a particular searchengine.

A high overture score can give you some good confirmation that a domain isworth something. Why? Because if consumers are searching for a phrase in highnumbers then, in general, you can assume that it therefore has some highcommercial value. But you need to put it into context as there may be somehighly searched terms that have no commercial value at all.

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Always make sure that you do not use Overture alone, and check the translationand use other methods listed below as well.

Where Overture does not apply, you can look for an alternative - for instance

Yandex is Russia's equivalent.

Opinions of Real Natives

You cannot beat getting the advice of a local. Only a local can be aware of yourgrammatical errors or notice the idioms of the language and multiple meaningsor words that you would never spot.

If you are an internet marketer, you should have an advantage here - you canuse your existing outsourcing abilities and knowledge to obtain some goodtranslations and maybe even qualify them over the phone using Skype?

Outsourcing is a much underutilised activity in the domain speculators world.

Google Images

Google Image Search is a great way of building up a picture of a domain's worth.

Those characters might be meaningless to you but if you plug them into GoogleImages and every picture looks the same (e.g. a picture of a dog) then you canbe pretty sure you know that you have a widely used term and probably themost commonly used.

If, on the other hand, you get very mixed image results and can't even work outthe common theme then you can be pretty sure that your word isn't verybrandable. It could even be some kind of grammatical construction and isunlikely to be something that a lot of people on the internet would be lookingfor.

Google Search & Adwords

Another good idea is to check out the standard Google search engine results. I

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Frankly, there are so many ways to go out and find the gold. Many speculatorskeep their strategies secret and reveal only to their closes confidantes.

Ultimately, this is an informational exercise and because you have access to theweb, all the tools and resources you need are out there. Its just a question of

you thinking outside of the box and making the most of them.

There are so many possibilities and once you get going, ideas could pop intoyour head at any time e.g. on the bus, so I recommend that you keep anotebook.

However, I do have a few suggestions of my own that I use both for ascii andIDNs.

What you want to do is to build up your own word list. I suggest to use Excel orOpen Office to keep these lists.

You can go ahead and use Notepad if you wish. But personally, I like to annotateor label my word lists and domain lists and this will be a royal pain in theyou_know_where if you try to do it with Notepad.

Now you can either collect word lists in English or the local language.

If you collect a word list in English then think about sites where you might findcategory names or lists of consumer goods. Copy and paste as much as you canand don't worry about dupes as these are easily filtered out.

You want this list to grow with time because at any given moment you will runthis list through a translator such as Google Translate and stuff the output into abulk domain checker on a registrar's site.

By the way, if you are going to get serious then you might want toconsider getting a program to manage your bulk checking. These can doall sorts of things like use proxies for faster checking or just throw in ahuge wordlist and leave it running while you have a coffee no morepasting into a slow web form in groups of 50. My own personal preferenceis DRT. You can click here to check out the many features and videos ofthis excellent program which is good for both IDN and ascii domains.

The other way you can do it is to make a word list in the local language bycopying the words from a website. Although you can't really use this word list forother languages (the translation from one language to another could well be

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worse than with English as one leg of the translation), it should be much bettertargeted as it never went through a translator.

The other way you can find hand regs is to brainstorm and try to figure outwhere new words on the internet originate. Or try to think out of the box and

where the mainstream have not yet looked. This is tough and you have theadded complexity of a foreign language. But just like the gold panning days,there is still gold to be had if you are willing to put in the effort!

Nevertheless, it is not impossible for you to find good hand regs, even today in2008. Plus there are many countries that still have landrushes. For instance, atthe time of writing, Spain recently had an IDN.info landrush just a few days ago.

Oh, and here's a tip I have used when buying any domains, ascii or IDN. Letssay that you've found some available domains and are about to register. Youhave a shortlist ready for registering. My advice is to ditch 90% of them. That's

just a personal tip and has stopped me buying useless domains. It is so easy toget worked up about a domain that you think is good and then end up buying itand wasting ten bucks! If you dont ditch them then at least have a second lookor ask a friend.

Secondary Market

The secondary market is full of IDN bargains and should definitely not be

ignored. Also, unlike ascii domains, you don't need huge amounts of capital toget a foothold in the secondary market.

Grabbing a Dropped Domain

Unlike the ascii market, where you can register with several companies inpreparation, there is no established way of back ordering a domain that hasdropped (owner is not renewing it) and hoping to grab it.

There are some pros who use scripts but, from what I can tell, it is very difficultto compete against them.

Instead, if you want to grab a name that has dropped then you should use oneof the auction services who, if they grab it, will offer it to the highest bidder.

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The main auctioneer for recently dropped domains is SnapNames and you caneven download an Excel formatted list of domains to be auctioned.

Picking Up Bargains From The Forums

Forums are the other good place where you can pick up some bargains. Peoplehave different motivations for letting go their domains but there do seem to be alot of bargains to be had.

Make sure you don't just look at the very busy or IDN-centric forums but alsocheck out the smaller ones too.

On these forums, there are often two types of sections. One is for fixed price andthe other is for auction. Remember though that everything is negotiable - Iwould take the phrase "fixed price" with a pinch of salt.

Also, if you are buying high value domains, I recommend that you play it safeand use an escrow service. One of the more popular ones is Moniker.

There is a list of these forums with IDN sections in the Tools and Resourcessection.

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If you have a lot of domains that are more speculative plays or in emergingmarkets then they you might need to sell a few each year to cover the fees.

If they get this right then there is no downside and only upside. The only loss

each year is your time and the "only way is up"!

A Good Beginners Strategy

I recently asked on one of the forums, what a good strategy might be for anewcomer. I figured it would be to go for secondary market bargains and somenew registrations in emerging markets but I also received some more excellentadvice:

New registration gold can be found in emerging markets such as Banglaand Azeri.

If you have the capital, stick with the secondary market. Youll get abetter return on your time and money combined.

There are still many second tier hand regs available but be prepared towait for the value to appreciate.

Like you would your pension or your investments, diversify between low

risk (e.g. Japan) and high risk (e.g. Venezuela).

Study the broader market such as relative country growth rates,population numbers etc.

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Other Characteristics of the IDN Market

The Naysayers and Doommongers

Today, you'll find very few people saying bad things about investing in IDNs butthe situation four years ago was completely different. Its a sign of how far IDNshave come in terms of acceptance by consumers and traditional domainspeculators.

Four years ago, IDN investors were derided for their beliefs and their investmentdecisions. Today, you hardly ever see this criticism on mainstream domainforums.

Part of this is the ever looming realisation that IDNs are here to stay andbecoming more popular each year. The political will is also there. Nearly all themainstream forums now have an IDN section and active community.

These sections have been created because the demand was driven by morepeople converting to IDN and helped by many big hitters announcing that IDNsare the way to go.

The Active IDN Community

Most of the active IDN community hang out on IDNForums.com. If you want tolearn more about IDNs then there is no single better place to go and you cannotlearn more anywhere else.

There is a mixture of people on there you have the "founder members" whoare sitting on millions of dollars of virtual real estate (even at today'svalues) to those who are new to the game like you probably will be.

Domain Tasting

Some registrars offer you the ability to give your domain back if you don't want

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it, within 5 days of purchase. This is called "domain tasting".

Many people can therefore buy a domain, test it to see if there is any trafficbeing received to it, and then decide to keep or return it.

It is frowned upon somewhat, even by Google according to recent news, so itmay not be here to stay.

Trademarks

In regular ascii domains, there is simply no point in getting a trademarked name.The complainant will simply file for a WIPO arbitration which does not cost themmuch and who will almost certainly rule in their favour.

In the IDN world, it is a lot more muddy. For instance, in many languages theyuse phonetic translations which sound similar to the original.

So in China they probably call Britney Spears by her phonetic translation whichsounds like a Chinese person saying "Britney Spears" in his best English!

Incidentally, I quickly checked Wikipedia and the .com for .com appears to be free! But strangely the .org isn't - perhaps it's notvery valuable or my translation is wrong.

But it illustrates to you the point - can you use a phonetic translation and getaway with it? IDN is such an immature market at the moment that there havenot been any significant test cases that I know of.

There have been trademark cases for romanised language domains such as forinstance, the French domain crditmutuel.net, where a cybersquatter registeredthe IDN.net including the (with accent). Obviously, this is a morestraightforward case.

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Developing IDN Sites

This is where internet marketers can really come into their own and wheredomain speculators have traditionally lacked the know how.

A developed foreign language (from your perspective) website will be quitesimilar to those in the western world, the main differences being:

The need to hire translators if you do not know the local language. Local customs. Local laws to comply with.

Even if your time is valuable, internet marketers are better placed to leverageresources such as outsourced contractors who will do the work for them.

Hosting With IDNs

So how to you set up your host when you want to have a website under yourIDN domain?

It's simple - first of all you just set up the nameservers or DNS entries at theregistrar like you normally would.

Next, when you add the domain via your host's control panel, you just enter thepunycode version of the domain e.g. xn--tdali-d8a8w.com

Remember that the browser handles the redirection so the underlying site is thepunycode which is understood by all machines on the internet.

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Selling IDNs

Unless you're in it purely for the parking income or other future income, thenone day you'll want to want to cash in and sell at least some of your IDNportfolio.

In many ways you're in a much stronger position than the buyer because ifyou've checked your stats then you will know the current traffic and income forthe domain.

The only way you might lose out is if the buyer thinks that the domain has ahigher potential future value but I guess that is his opinion versus your own andof little consideration if you have decided to sell.

I have not yet sold any of my limited IDN portfolio but I do know from my asciidomain trading days that there tend to be a few different types of buyers.

Some buyers will spot value but never negotiate. You can call their bluff anddemand a higher price than their first offer but risk losing the sale.

But normally, most buyers expect a shrewd domain seller to reject the first offerand demand more, especially if he has competition.

The best places to sell are at the domain forums (especially IDN Forums) wherethey usually have an open auction format where you can clearly see who is

bidding and competing for your domain. Just create a new thread and offer yourdomains for sale and the bids will start coming in, such is the good liquidity inthe secondary market.

Even if you go into one of the appraisal sections on a forum and ask people toappraise your domains, you can bet that you'll get several PMs. This is similar toa blind auction where each bidder cannot see the other bids, unless you tellthem.

You should also make sure that your address details with your registrar are kept

up to date. This way, potential buyers can contact you if they want to make youan offer.

If you have a really big ticket domain to sell, then you are better off going toSnapNames who will get you an audience with the big hitters.

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I would advise that you look on some of the forums at some of the historic salesto get an idea of what different domains are worth.

And again, if you are selling a mid to high value domain but not high enough togo with someone like SnapNames, play it safe and use a reputable escrow

service such as Moniker.

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Tools and Resources

Here are some excellent tools and resources that I highly recommend you checkout:

Registrars

Dynadot newer kid on the block but a very good interface and has quicklygained popularity. If you want to help me out, please enter the code7r8i8Q06u6k8x6s into the refer-a-friend box at the bottom of the applicationform.DomainSite very experienced IDN registrar.eNom

MonikerJP Domains excellent for Japanese domains.

Parking Sites

NameDriveSedoParking PanelName Rich good for Chinese traffic.Parked.ru site in Russian language!

Traffic Checkers

Overture ChinaOverture Japan

Yandex Russian traffic

Tools

DRT Bulk checker and more. This is a fantastic tool that I own myself andhighly recommend, good for both IDN and ascii. Click the link to check out thefeatures and videos of it in action.IDN Tools - Droplists, traffic estimators and much more.

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https://www.dynadot.com/http://www.domainsite.com/http://www.enom.com/http://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=monikreghttp://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=jpdomainshttp://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=namedrivehttp://www.sedo.co.uk/http://www.parkingpanel.com/http://namerich.com/http://parked.ru/http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=hkhttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=jphttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=jphttp://wordstat.yandex.ru/http://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=drthttp://www.idntools.net/https://www.dynadot.com/http://www.domainsite.com/http://www.enom.com/http://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=monikreghttp://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=jpdomainshttp://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=namedrivehttp://www.sedo.co.uk/http://www.parkingpanel.com/http://namerich.com/http://namerich.com/http://parked.ru/http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=hkhttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=jphttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=hkhttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=jphttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=jphttp://wordstat.yandex.ru/http://www.profitswithchris.com/link.php?id=drthttp://www.idntools.net/


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Forums with IDN sections

IDN Forums the best place to hang out to learn and talk about IDN, bar none.DNForum this is the biggest meeting point for the domain industry as a whole

serious domain speculators here and very few kids.Namepros very friendly general domains community with a small IDN section.DNLocal the next biggest place to chat about IDNs, after IDN Forums above.DomainState like Namepros, a general forum with a nice community and asmall IDN section.

Blogs and other Sites reporting on IDNs

d omaining blog good domain news, mainstream and IDN.IDNFAQ various IDN resources.IDNSearch bizarre site submit your IDN and show it off!IDNcyclopedia - IDN news.IDN Talk a blog by Olney, a big IDN investor.IDN News IDN news blog, just like it says!DomainTools Blog decent general domain name news.IDNs.ws country population stats and handy online dictionary links

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What Future Can We See For IDNs?

So you can see that IDNs are still very much in their infancy but now taking agood foothold in many markets.

It's a bit like a child who is pretty close to learning how to walk - they aremaking testing movements with their legs and you know that it is only a matterof days before they start to walk on their own.

Why February 12 Is an Important Date

I mentioned it earlier but I'll say it again to you - February 12th is an important

date in IDN. Now don't expect an explosion of traffic when IE7 becomes acompulsory update but do expect an increased rate of growth in traffic and valueof IDNs.

Personally, I think that shortly after, a lot more mainstream domainers will enterthe market and this will further inflate prices so it's important to GET IN NOW!

It's a bit like the stock market, you see. In a highly efficient market then if themarket expects a half percent cut in interest rates and it actually happens then itwill not move at all - because it expected it and therefore it was already factoredinto the market price.

Well, the IDN market is far from being an efficient market and it is my belief thatwe will see an even more pronounced appreciation in prices in the months afterFebruary compared to the months before.

IDN.IDN

IDN.IDN is the future of the IDN world. You have already seen that even

IDN.com and ccTLD IDNs in their current forms are valuable.

ICANN works hard to ensure slow, well tested and meaningful changes - this alsoincludes the conversion from existing TLDs to their local language equivalents.

This requires a lot of negotiation at local level in each of the countries but the

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results so far are promising and the market believes it too as you can see in thehealthy prices for domains.

And remember, no country wants to upset the current holders of IDN - it is notjust a bunch of foreign speculating investors who are at risk but many, many

natives as well.

Add to this that many of those attending the industry roundtables have beenquoted as saying words to the effect of "the benefits of implementing IDN.IDNwill outweigh the work needed to get it done". This is the resounding opinion ofmany parties concerned.

Therefore I think the future is very bright indeed.

Stay Abreast of Landrushes

A landrush is when a new extension or similar is announced and speculators rushto get the available gold out there.

Although some names are reserved for locals and others, you can get a lot ofgold if you get in there within the first few days.

Remember to keep that regularly updated word list as it will come in useful andkeep reading the forums to stay abreast of news of impending landrushes.

One of my mistakes recently was that I was so concentrated on the IM worldthat I neglected the world of domains. Lesson learned!

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Final Thoughts

I hope you found this guide to be very enlightening and useful.

Remember that there is still gold out there to be found. This is definitely a timewhen that old mantratake actionis especially fitting!

If you have any questions then please dont hesitate to contact me at

Good luck and may you have much success with IDNs!

Chris Smith

ProfitswithChris.com
http://www.profitswithchris.com/http://www.profitswithchris.com/

IDN On Steroids

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