Blacknight Solutions are a domain registration / website hosting company based in Carlow. They’ve grown quite fast over the past couple of years, and according to Webshosting.info, have a massive percentage share of the Irish market when it comes to domain registrations. And it’s easy to see why. Their newest sales tool – dropped.ie – is a great way to search for and stumble across ‘second hand’ .ie domain names. As someone who used to spend hours trawling the deleted domains list on the IEDR website to find little domain name gems, sites like dropped.ie are a godsend.
So, why bother even registering ‘second hand’ domain names? Isn’t the domain name of the website you currently have not enough?
It depends on what you’re looking for.
Let’s say you’re a chauffeur drive / wedding car business based in Wexford. The name of your business is ‘Jimmy’s Dream Cars’. You have a website – jimmysdreamcars.ie – and get a bit of business from it, but most of your leads are from word of mouth referrals or magazine advertising. How could an ‘online rebrand’ by renaming your website help you?
Pop over to dropped.ie. Search for ‘wedding cars wexford’. In amongst all the results (the search isn’t probably as specific as it could be, but i’m sure they’ll fix it up in good time) you’ll find a used .ie domain ‘wexfordweddingcars.ie’. But why should you buy it?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is one of the best ways to drive free, targeted traffic towards your website. If you purchase ‘wexfordweddingcars.ie’ and your website is even reasonably well built and with a little bit of tweaking, you’ll have a far greater chance of appearing high up in Google’s search results for ‘wedding cars wexford’ if your website is at ‘wexfordweddingcars.ie’ instead of ‘jimmysdreamcars.ie’. You’ll get heaps of great business enquiries from your locality that’s both targeted and – apart from the cost of the domain – free.
Sites like dropped.ie are also great for people like me, who are constantly trying to think of new business ideas to keep me going. I’ve managed to find some fantastic ‘second hand’ domain names in the past. One of these was ‘compare.ie‘ which I bought one day just over two years ago.
Before I browsed the IEDR’s deleted domain names list that day, i’d only briefly thought about the fact that Ireland didn’t really have any price comparison websites. When I stumbled across ‘compare.ie’ in the list, it reminded me of that gap in the market. I bought the domain name, had a think for a few months about what exactly to do with it, developed a site, and now it’s a successful business in itself with over 200,000 unique visitors per month, and one which i’m ramping up development on as we speak. A new ‘Travel’ channel has just been completed, which allows you to compare flights, hotels, car hire, and even airport parking, and our new mobile phone and broadband comparison channels are well on the way to completion. It’s a proper business, one thats growing, and one that pretty much only came about because of the availability of a great domain name!
So there you go – dropped.ie isn’t just a place for finding great domain names. It’s a great place to help you ignite that spark in your head for your next great business idea!