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4. (The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building A Healthy Food Niche Site From $0 to $10,000: Domain Selection

(The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building A Healthy Food Niche Site From $0 to $10,000: Domain Selection

[This blog post is a summary (rather than a direct transcription) of the screen share video, repurposed for improved clarity.]

So today we’re going to talk about how I choose a domain. Basically, I choose either a new domain or an aged domain and as I mentioned in the last video, I regularly buy and sell domains.

Option 1: Picking a New Domain

When searching for new domain ideas, I use chatGPT to generate a list of potential names. Remember last time we picked Indian Cuisine as an example so we’ll use that again today.

For the prompt, you can use something like this:

“Please give me 20 ideas for a domain name in the Indian Cuisine topic, it is mandatory that the phrase ‘Indian Cuisine’ is in the domain and the go. And be careful of the length of the name, the shorter the better.”

We generate this list of 20 to make sure you have a variety of different options and can choose the one that best fits your goal. Once you pick a few that you like, you can go to a site like NameCheap or GoDaddy to see which are available.

As for choosing which domain to go with, the most important thing is to make sure that it is brandable. This of course is the same for aged domains as well but you want to be sure for instance that your name doesn’t include anything too confusing, highly personalized with someone’s name or the name of a government agency.

Something like IndianCuisineHub.com is perfect as it’s easy to spell, relatively short and easy to understand and it could be easily expanded into all things Indian Food.

Option 2: Buying an Aged Domain

If you’re buying an aged domain, the most important and that’s that the domain is clean. It should have a good backlink profile and no trademark issues.

In order to check for any potential trademark issues you can go to the USPTO website or the WIPO and validate whether or not the name you want to use is already registered.

When you want to buy an aged domain, there’s quite a bit more criteria that we’ll want to look at. I’m going to break down the criteria in lists below and then give a brief explanation on how to search and validate these items.

• Only domains with “.info”, “.org”, “.com”, and “.net”
• Domain/Page Authority (DA/PA) 15+
• Trust/Citation Flow (TF/CF) 10+
• Domain Ranking (DR) 15+
• Referring Domains 50+
• CF:TF maximum 2:1 (20:10)
• Link history index (Majestic) good
• TF on the main URL above 35

For the criteria above, you can use a tool like Ahrefs to validate. If you’re looking for more ideas or are interested in buying an expired domain, you can go to ExpiredDomains.net and use the GoDaddy filters to find the most trustworthy results.

Once you know that your domain hits the metrics listed above, you’ll want to do some deeper research on the site to make sure that it has a clean history. Below are the final items I consider:

• Indexed in Google and Bing (check this by searching “site:domain.com” in the search engines)
• The Indexed search results shouldn’t have spammy japanese/russian language or any other weird elements.
• Organic keywords, Inbound and Outbound Backlinks:
  • Looks natural, no spammy keywords
  • If there’s a spike in Inbound backlinks, make sure there’s a good reason.
  • Inbound links should also not be from spammy links like GSA/etc.
• Archive.ORG (for checking the history of the domain):
  • Consistent archive history, never repurposed
  • Last live from archive.org recently. Not more than 12 months for the best domains.
• Anchor text: Clean anchor text without spammy keywords
• No past 301 Redirect.

In order to check the backlink profile and keywords, you can actually use the free Ahrefs backlink checker tool for free to make sure it checks off all the criteria. After the research is done, you can go ahead with buying your aged domain.