One of the biggest challenges facing new and established domain name owners is how to find profitable new domains. It's particularly tough when you are trying to implement a strategy on a mass scale. It's actually very analgous to panning for gold. You have to pan through a lot of dirt (poor domains) before you find the odd nugget of gold (good domain).

If you are in the registration game then you need to determine if a domain has traffic prior to registering it. This is tough considering the only definitive way that you can determine if a domain has traffic is to register the domain. Registration costs at $6.95 for dotcoms sounds inexpensive until you begin to multiply the figure by thousands of domains.

In the past it didn't take long for domainers to realise that there was a relationship between a domain's traffic and what people search for. This lead many domainers to tools like that developed by Overture which measures how many times a keyword has been searched from a subset of users on the Internet.

What was really interesting about the Overture tool was that it also reported on how often a domain name with it's extension (eg. .com part) was searched for. The higher the Overture score the more likely that domains would receive traffic. It was still a little more art than science but it helped significantly reduce registration costs in an effort to find traffic domains that could be monetized.

Overture has remained free for a long time and this resulted in it being abused by hungry domainers, eager to find that next nugget of gold with their super automated domain finding applications. It wasn't long before Overture's servers began to crumble under the demand and restrictions to the tool were adopted in an effort to reduce the server loads. Although the Overture tool is still operational much of its data is out of date and will remain so until Yahoo (the tools owner) works out what to do with it.
This left an opportunity for a number of other "Overture" like tools to step into the market. Tools such as vurr by AOL and WordTracker. The problem with these tools is that they've never had the scale the provides the necessary resolution to assist in determining if a domain has traffic.

A couple of long established Australian Internet entrepreneurs from Trellian journeyed to the TRAFFIC conference a couple of years ago and saw that they were sitting on a rich deposit of data that twenty times larger than Vurr and WordTracker and was begging to be mined by domainers. The product is called Keyword Discovery and is an excellent application that provides all that is necessary for domainers in their quest for traffic domains.

The below table illustrates just how powerful Keyword Discovery really is compared to its competitors and also the old Overture system:

* Taken over 2 months
** Keywords taken over 90 days.
*** Reports scores as low as 1, potentially making it 4 times better than overture.
Since Keyword Discovery # reports scores as low as 1 it is potentially up to 4-5 times better at predicting if domains have traffic as compared to Overture. If you are looking for a substitute for overture then Keyword Discovery could be a good alternative in your quest for traffic domains. I'd highly recommend trying the Trellian product out - click here to go directly to information on keyword discover.

Wiki - Keyword Discovery, Overture, Vurr, Wordtracker, Trellian, TRAFFIC 
# - This is an affiliate link to Keyword discovery.  A condition of sponsorship or any form of advertising on whizzbangsblog is that it does not change editorial policy

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