A person wanting to buy one of my domain names, MountainMaven.com, contacted me the other day with an offer of a hundred bucks. Yikes.

People overlook the importance of a good domain name. They underestimate their value.  Having the right name is more important than ever in this crowded marketplace. It can become a company’s most important asset and in many cases the name is their entire brand.

After receiving the unsolicited offer, I realized that if I wanted to sell my domain for what I thought it was worth, I needed to proactively market it.

I purchased MountainMaven.com because it was an easy to remember, two-word name that was also search engine friendly and a top-level .com (TLD). The name Mountain Maven just rolls off your tongue and has a nice aural rhythm and meter to it. I own a couple of hundred more just like it.

Mountain Maven would make a perfect marketing campaign microsite for a corporate giant like Eastern Mountain Sports or Columbia Sports Wear. And how much do you think it’d be worth if National Geographic or the Discovery Channel decided to create a TV series around green mountain living or extreme snowboarding lifestyles? It’d also make a great corporate blog for a large ski company like Elan, K2, or Atomic (or Jake Burton). The possibilities are endless.

I’ve been doing a lot of research for my employer over the last few weeks, trying to create unique product and company names (and the domains to go with them).  It’s hard…really hard, and its time consuming, too.  But there are still a lot of good domain names out there if you know how to look.

My process is pretty much the same as other people searching for a good domain name. I fire up Google and start doing keyword searches based on a broad idea and then I start building out possible domain names from there. I also use keyword tools to create an initial seed list.

For me, it’s kind of like being in a John Nash-like state of mind. Just like in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, I make mental notes of all the keywords I see while searching Google, MSN and Yahoo and I start putting them in different order, saying the name aloud in my head. Once I get one that has a nice ring to it, I type the name directly into the address bar, add a .com to the end, and see if it’s available.

If it’s a parked page with no content, I do a whois search to see how long it’s been registered and when it is going to expire. If it is going to expire within a year, I put the expiration date on my calendar and keep an eye on it. I’ve purchased several domains this way. The user simply lost interest or forgot that they owned it.

If it’s been registered for six years or more by the same person, I move on…that person obviously knows its value. Using a tool like DomainTools.com will tell you who owns it, how long they’ve owned it, when it is going to expire, and how many times it’s changed owners (along with other interesting data about the domain beyond the scope of this post).

Here are the minimum requirements I look for when purchasing a brand new domain name (purchasing existing names will be covered in another post.):

1. It has to be a (.com). Dot com is the assumed extension when people think about a domain name or type one in a browser. Dot com is still king and will be for a very, very long time.
2. Needs to be two English language words. Sometimes three if it is really good, but the shorter the better.
3. The name needs to have a nice sound and meter. It needs to be easy and pleasant to say out loud.
4. Those two or three words need to identify a business opportunity that I can develop a website around.
5. It would make a nice microsite for a marketing campaign.
6. A subject matter that people would actually spend money on. (e.g. A visitor to this domain might buy snowboarding accessories.)
7. Search engine friendly keywords  (This domain only qualifies if it becomes the name of a television series or a popular ad campaign…are you listening, Budweiser Coors?)
8. No misspellings. (e.g. MountainMavin)
9. No dashes or hyphens. (e.g. Mountain-Maven)
10. No abbreviations. (e.g. MtnMaven)
11. No prefixes. (e.g. MyMountainMaven or iMountainMavin)
12. No numbers. (e.g. 1MoutainMaven)
13. Make sure the name doesn’t have a sordid past. Did the previous owner drop it for a reason? It’s not impossible to build back trust, but you want to make sure past bad press and comments don’t show up when people search for your new name.

Smart companies scour the blogosphere searching for references to their own brand (for better or for worse), and the fact that I mention them by name here in this post is by design. With any luck, one of these smart companies will find this post and make an offer for my domain closer to the $5000 figure I had floating in my head.

At the end of the day, though, a domain name is only worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it.  I think this one is worth more than a hundred bucks, though. Guess I should start developing it.

I don’t really have the time to do freelance work anymore, but I did manage to whip this one up over the weekend for my friend Kim and her new business venture, Little Darlings, Inc.. I took on the project mostly because I wanted more experience setting up an e-commerce site using Network Solutions’ Pro E-Commerce platform. Kim’s a good friend, so I made an exception to my self-imposed “No. More. Freelance. Ever.” rule. Apologies to Joan Crawford.

While I was at it, I gave her site a little face lift and re-coded the entire thing with standards-based XHTML and CSS. A complete separation of presentation from structure – design from data. Here’s the “Before” shot. This project was a soup-to-nuts website redesign and e-commerce implementation completed in just 28 hours. Not too shabby.

365 days ago I began a little (unsanctioned) experiment with my junk mail folder here at BlueTie. I thought it’d be interesting to go a whole year without ever emptying it. I set my junk mail preference to the least restrictive setting possible (0 out of a possible 10) so I could see how many spam messages (if any) would make it to my inbox. I also wanted to measure how many (if any) legitimate messages would be mistakenly marked as spam (false-positives).

It’s been one year, and BlueTie has successfully filtered over 9600 junk emails from ever hitting my inbox. The bad news? One legitimate email (out of nearly 10,000) was mistakenly flagged as spam and 2-3 junk messages a week still fly under the radar and end up in my inbox.  Spammers are constantly devising new ways to sneak past filters. I get that. I can live with 2-3 a week, believe me.

Of course, I’m not your typical user. My email address is very easy for spammers to guess and I have multiple (also easy-to-guess) email addresses pointing to a single account. I’m also a marketing and technology guy, which means I’ve signed up for hundreds and hundreds of fly-by-night Web 2.0 beta applications and marketing newsletters over the past few years. Who knows what these companies did with my private information when they went belly-up. My point is this; I get significantly more spam than the average person.

To give you an idea of how bad this world-wide junk mail problem has become, I was told by our engineers that BlueTie actually blocks 90+% of spam messages before they even enter the BlueTie system to  be processed and filtered. These are completely invisible to the end user and never even see the light of day.

The only way for my current inbox to receive less spam is to change my email address and start over, but the cost of ‘switching’ is way too high for me. Too many friends and business associates already know my email address, and my email address is also my username on over a hundred websites I’ve registered with. It would take weeks to switch and it would be a real pain-in-the-the ass, to boot. And how am I supposed to move gigabytes of data and thousands upon thousands of emails into an new inbox? In any case, as soon as I start using a new address, the cycle of spam starts all over again if (read:WHEN) it falls into the wrong hands.

So considering the total cost of switching, I think can live with BlueTie’s 99.9% filtering accuracy.

Full disclosure and disclaimer: I work for BlueTie, so obviously I am biased; but our junk mail system is doing a remarkable job by any measure.  Also, this little experiment of mine was not approved or authorized by BlueTie in any way. These were the results from my email account. Your mileage may vary.

EDIT: The 9600 number shown in the screenshot above is the number of unread spam messages, not the total number of messages in the folder itself, which is higher.