The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

Here’s a video tutorial on finding internationalized (IDN) domain names using SC-Unipad (trialware) and the IDN Research Tool (shareware).





Language based domain names, also called International Domain Names or IDNs, have recently sold for upwards of $10,000. They are slowly gaining in popularity and are expected to become much more popular in the next 5-10 years. There is a second ‘domain gold rush’ to secure available dictionary based, high search volume domain names.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use a free software tool called SC Unipad with the IDN Research Tool to quickly find and purchase high quality dictionary IDN domain names. You can also purchase regular domain names using the IDN Research tool, although they are much harder to find.

SC Unipad is a shareware tool that supports more than 300 languages and 54500 unicode characters.

I’m opening a Chinese dictionary word list that I found on the IDN blog

Open SC Unipad and import your Chinese word list. Select the list of Chinese words and copy them to Excel. I’m formatting the characters before importing them into the IDN Research tool by appending .com to the end of each word. To do this I go to Tools -> Text To Columns in Excel, then select “Delimited by Space” to format the word list correctly.

Then, in cell B1, I enter “A1&”.com” to add .com to the end of each Chinese word. Then fill down. Copy all words in column B, open up the IDN Research Tool, go to the Options menu and select IDN converter. Make sure you are in the tab that says “To Punycode” and then paste in your Chinese domains. Click “Convert”. You are converting the Chinese characters into the Ascii-code equivalent.

Before scanning, go to Options-> Scan settings, and make sure only “Availability’ is selected. At this point we only want to check to see if the IDN domain is available.

Then click the play looking button and the IDN Research tool will start checking the availability of your domains.

After scanning, sort the list by availability, then convert the available domains back into the foreign characters by right clicking and going to Convert -> From Punycode.

If you find a domain that is available, you can go to Google Trends or do a Google search with the foreign based characters to see if many people are using the domain in search queries. This will give you a good idea if the domain has value.

In this example, I found a 1-character domain name. At this point, there are still quite a few high quality dictionary based domain names available in many languages.

As a side note, you will be using the ascii characters (or ‘punycode’) if you want to register the domain name. Any domain registrar will allow you to register the IDN domain. Although, it’s a good idea to register a Japanese IDN with a Japanese registrar, so you can secure the domain along with the foreign extension, such as .jp for Japan.

You can find a $100 off coupon for the IDN Research tool at the IDN Research Tool home page.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 6:23 pm and is filed under domaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.