IDNPlace

1. Research, Research, Research your target audience. Don’t assume that keyword value transcends languages.  Not all cultures embrace legal, financial, and health distress.  Suing an individual or organization in some countries is not an option or if it is its not a highly advertised keyword on the Internet.  Therefore keywords such as Mesothelioma (a type of cancer), personal injury, asbestos, and other keyword combination’s including the terms loan, attorneys, & diet are not going to be anywhere near as valuable in Chinese as they are in English. This is not due to the economies of the 2 countries or due to Internet penetration differences or advertising budgets ect.  All of those are important factors to consider but the reason is the Chinese are simply not running around trying to sue everyone or anything they can. They also don’t have large sums of personal debt to consider.  Also in my personal opinion their nutritional intake is much healthier than a typical Americans, well at least mine. Therefore those terms are not as valuable in Chinese as they are in English. So how can you get to know your target culture? The best way is to interact with natives, either in person which may not be feasible or online in chat rooms, forums, and blogs.  You can also use Google translate to translate some of the popular native websites and news feeds. You can find those by searching Alexa.com via a Google search using translated keywords.

2. Understand the economy associated with the language.  Is the country a developing Internet country where they may even have a large number of Internet users but not much in the way of online advertising and/or online purchasing?  Or is the country ripe with online purchasing and online advertising.  If you are going to monetize your IDN domain then you need avenues available to do so.  Countries that have large online advertising budgets help facilitate parking revenue as well monetizing via adwords.  Established online purchasing within a country also gives you the ability to monetize via affiliate networks and lead generation.

3. How many Internet users are there associated with your target language.

• Chinese  1.4 Billion
• Hindi 700 million
• Arabic  550 million total speakers (300 million native speakers/250 non native)
• Spanish 450 million (1st and 2nd language)
• Russian 278 million
• German 200 million (Native & non-Native)
• Japanese 130 million
• Thai 20 million
• Hebrew 7.5 million

*For comparison: Total English speaking people in the world 500 million

4. Triple check your translation.  Make sure you have the correct form of the word and that the word can stand alone.  Understand that some words mean different things in different regions.  The meaning of Chinese and Arabic terms may differ across geographic regions. Also make sure you know the most popular meaning for the term.  For instance what does “poker” mean?  Does it mean the thing you use to stoke a fire, a “poker”?  Or does it mean the vastly popular card game “poker”?

5. Know the current state of the IDN market for your language and extension.  The best place to gauge that is at IDNForums.com.  Another way to check is dnjournal sales, however they only list top selling names.  Therefore you would miss opportunities to hand register a name for $x and potentially sell it for $xx or even $xxx at IDNF.