Eeeawww!
Just so it doesn’t look like I’m painting a one sided picture of my endevours ….. posting yesterday about how I saved £1000 – today I get to post about the complete opposite, sometimes I can be a complete donkey 
Watching tv there was a bit about how more people are staying in the UK for holidays and caravanning is on the increase, these are the types of analysis that get me heading for the keyword tool!
It’s heading off season now but I typed in ‘caravan’ and as expected the top results coming back were
1/ caravan 368,000 exact searches per month on average -sheesh!
2/ caravans 165,000 exact searched
Now both of these are very expensive domains so moving down the list in 3rd place
3/ touring caravan – 135,000 exact searched per month – ouch! that’s quite a lot still
Check with my wife ‘ what’s a touring caravan?’ she confirmed it’s just a normal caravan that goes on the back of your car, ie not a static caravan, okey dokey that looks interesting!
Checked the domain and it’s parked, email the seller – I email an offer of £750, very respectable I think, turns out a domainer owned it and recognised my email address and sent my a private message saying I could have it for £1000 plus VAT. Hmm, fair enough, chunk of change but I like it and I ain’t going to be buying caravan.co.uk or caravans.co.uk so 3rd best in a growing market at an acceptable price.
Deal was done and I was happy, that was until I was doing so more reasearch on the domain to see if it had been used before, I googled the url and found this post from March this year on a domain forum that went like this………..
Donkey! if only I had found that earlier I could have bought the domain for £50! I paid a price I was happy to pay for a domain I wanted but I felt pretty stupid when I found that post, so after yesterday’s post i’ll just call it evens 
More due diligence required when thinking of making offers!
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Nice to know you’re human, Scott!
Still if you thought it was worth the £1000 it’s still a good deal. Look forward to the post in a couple of months when you sell it for £10,000!
Cheers, Jon
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Nice addition anyway Scott!
I see that you’re using similar CMS for these kind of sites, but it’s not Wordpress. Could you share with us which CMS are you using? Or maybe it’s a custom one.
Cheers
Javier’s last blog post..Electric Motor Scooter: Efficient and Environmentally-Sound
Those are just mini-sites done by aeiou.com, there is no CMS used on them, just header/footer php files.
The interesting things is that the aeiou.com website is itself run off of wordpress!
I know the fealing re your caravan domain Scott, I did something very similar a couple fo weeks ago.
Cool.
Another question Scott. When you do your keyword research to buy domains like these, do you always look for exact match? If so, what’s a decent search number to make the purchase worth?
Javier’s last blog post..Electric Motor Scooter: Efficient and Environmentally-Sound
Yes I always look for exact match, however broad match can show the potential for a keyword but would need good development to take advantage of it, there is no rule I use, 30,000 searches for one product could be as valuable as 100,000 for another depending on the cpc/niche/potential/affiliate offers so gut instinct and some reading but usually upwards of 10,000 generally.
Thanks for the response Scott.
Do you consider things like last month traffic and last year trends? Do you think that’s important as well?
Because I’ve found keywords that get a huge amount of traffic but there’s no trend or last month data, so I’m wondering if those domains are actually getting that amount of traffic.
Yeah for sure, some things are very seasonal so the tool can only give so much info, and your right we have to measure how much importance/reliance we out on it.
What do you think about dotted domains? I see you’re using some like these for your tattoo sites.
I’m asking because sometimes I find a really nice keywords that’s getting a decent amount of searches but the domain is already taken.
How do you decide when to go with a dotted domain? Maybe checking if the competition is not so big for that niche or do you use another measure?
Javier’s last blog post..It Is Hard Not to Love Motorized Scooters
I think you are being too hard on yourself – we all make mistakes, and I don’t even think you made mistake. Ok, so maybe you could have bought it cheaper, but if you are happy with the price paid then there’s no problem.
Still looks like a good deal really Scott; I expect to see you make a post in about a years time on how you made a site on it and are now making ??? a day, and leased it out to someone for a grand a year
Scott, kudos for having the guts to post about the downside. You don’t see many folks admitting to their mistakes.
I just did some research with the keyword tool and found some curious results. I’ve wondered about how to get UK specific search results in the past, but never did enough digging to answer the question. I just took another look and “touring caravan” only shows 2400 avg searches. I’m in the US, so it makes sense that these would be US-centric results (caravans are called RVs over here). Then I noticed a not so obvious edit link allowing me to change language and country for the results. So I change it to UK and it shows 550,000 avg searches $1.13 est avg CPC. That’s a lot more than you’re seeing (”touring caravans” has 673,000). Any idea what might cause the discrepancy?
Thanks Nigel, caravans are seasonal and people may be selling up at the end of the season which we are at here now or looking for a bargain, my numbers are from a few weeks ago and they do seem to fluctuate, certainly more a UK term by the looks of it.
Regardless of the over-spend, I find it interesting that you were willing to spend that kind of coin on it simply because it had high search volume. This is a bit of a lesson for me.
PS – love the dating ads on the right of the site…
Just goes to show what happens when you try and sell on forums etc. So many times decent domains never seem to sell. Guess it means if you can’t sell via a large public forum all is not lost!
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Oh man, I think we’ve all been there. You get really excited and caught up in the moment and lose your head for a second.
I know I’ve done it too. These days I always Google around and search all the forums first to see who’s owned it and perhaps even how much the current owner paid if it was bought in the last few years.
Tool you are using to check out search volumes?
How much money you spend for domain buying, in 1 year?
Just wondered
Good job.
Around £50k