Domain Issue

[Reportcard]

Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust.

I have a few questions....

-Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy?

Any guidelines on how to value domains?

If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info?

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

Domaining is a huge industry in itself, but yes, there are some good ones out there.  dnforum.com and namepros.com have been two sites that interest me a lot.

General guidelines- .com's are by far worth the most based on supply/demand, especially anything with a single dictionary word or 2-4 letters (less always better, no numbers always better).  Other TLD's can be worth something, but seem to see much less consensus on their value.  Even the above- it does vary.  Sometimes you see a fish.com sell for $1 mil.  I've seen other dictionary words go for south of $5k (although that's been a little while).

At the end of the day, I would only consider what it's worth to you though.  I personally don't think that .com's will ever go anywhere, but the Internet is fast-paced, and there are no guarantees.  There are some pros out there that are buying some pretty fancy boats off of buying and selling, but they do it in large volumes, and play the numbers.  Personally, I ran a hosting company for 7 years, and had to resist a whole lot of temptation to buy up domains based on the enormous wealth of data of data on other webmasters kept in good faith that I had at my fingertips.

After leaving to start my own inbound marketing agency, I bought the domain of my last name (northcutt.com) for more than you've suggested, but there were real reasons (most of all, that I was left with little else than my personal brand to side-step into a totally different industry, and I had the chance to do it).   But that price was built into my startup budget.  Whatever you go with, I'd just make sure it's something you're happy with typing thousands of times, and explaining to people how to access.  A lot.  Anything short and memorable can also work well, and I wouldn't worry too much about weird TLD's for SEO anymore.  Personally, I'm a big fan of .io domains as well.