I've noticed a lot of people have been holding back at buying .me domains and are searching for the cheap places to get them. Today, I feel it is fair to say that the 2 best places to get cheap .me domains without sacrificing quality of service are Godaddy.com and Dotster.com. I've been a big fan of Godaddy since the beginning and most of my domains are hosted with them. Dotster.com on the other hand offers the same $19.99 for a .me domain price per year just like Godaddy does.

At $19.99, it is most probably the cheapest price you can get for a .me domain these days. Most other domain registrars offer about 20 percent of what these two offer for .me domains.

This is a question every .me domain buyer should be asking by now and there's a whole lot of people who already purchased theirs are now asking how much can fetch in the future. The answer depends on who you'll be asking.

A great number of people who bought dot me domains have done so because the words that compose the domain are "traffic magnets" or rather frequently searched words online. The traffic alone can make a .me domain valuable. That's why you see domains like britneyspears.me, debtconsolidation.me, obama.me or lasvegas.me fetch hundreds even thousands of dollars in the auctions.

Here's a few things that I think can make a .me domain valuable.

1. If send a complete message it is bound to be valuable. The .me domains are probably the most versatile domains yet. Although it is not the first ccTLD to sound like a complete sentence, it is the first domain that tells what you are all about. Girl.me, tag.me and style.me are awesome domains like these that sold for thousands of dollars recently and it's no wonder.

2. High-traffic keywords can make a good .me domain except this requires a little domain development. You won't get anywhere with a .me domain without at least some dev.

3. Geo .me domains are nice as well particularly popular destinations or frequently searched places like New York, London, Paris.

4. The .me domains that refer to a particularly lucractive business or economy are awesome. No need to explain here. Dot me domains like insure.me have been fought over until it finally sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

What doesn't make a good .me domain then? Trademarks... buyers are just bound to either lose them or become useless. Recently, I've come to think that .me domain hacks like extre.me, aweso.me or hanso.me will be dissapointments in the future.

Sync.me, verify.me and massage.me are the three most notable .me domains left among a handful of others in the auctions currently. In an unexpected turn of events ( at least to me ), the .me domains auctions is just a matter of a few days or even hours of being concluded.

At it's conclusion, the auctions would have raked in at least $2,100,000 from at roughly 2500 .me domains sold. I think this might be a record of some sort for a newly launched ccTLD. The value of dot me domains will be better realized when the "big boys" of them .me domains are auctioned off in September.

Buy.me, Ride.me and Fly.me are some of the domains expected to perform in the next auctions as these are considered cream of the crop because of their intrinsic commercial value. No word yet on exactly what date the next .me domain auctions will be.

As I got back to my normal blogging routine after a week long sabbatical due some weird internet connection problem, I found out a lot of "Googlers" have been finding their way to this blog wanting to find what the actual "value" of .me domains are.

One of the best ways to atually find out what a domain name value is by getting a domain appraisal ofcourse. There's tons of sources for that. One of the best in the busines is Godaddy's certified domain name appraisal. For 15 bucks, you get a certified domain value from industry experts to show off if you plan to take your .me domain in the selling block.

But if you just want to get a feel of how much people would be willing to shell out for your .me domains, listing them on domain auction sites like Godaddy's TDNAM.com and Sedo.com would be a good gauge. Both are trusted domain auction sites with an awesome number of willing buyers even for the weirdest domains. Go check out what your .me domains are worth now.

I should have known about this way way before but I guess it's not yet too late. One of the world's leading domain registrars, LCN.com have come up with a contest all .me domain enthusiast should love! Enter their funny .me domain contest and get a chance to win a 2-year registration for a .me domain and 1-year web hosting to boot. This enticing prize is surely worth squeezing your twisted mind!

Everybody will find LCN.com's funny .me domains contest one of the easiest thing to join. No weird requirements, just enter your name, email address and your .me domain entry and that's it! The contest will only run till the end of this month so better hurry up and get those brain cells working, enter the funny .me domain contest here and if the guys at LCN.com think your idea is outstandingly hilarious, you might just win it!
There's less than one week to join so sign-up here and find out if you've won on their LCN blog next September! All the best! BTW, I joined too... LOL youknowiknowyouwannado.me!

Checked out a few sold names over at the .me domains auction and found some interesting sold domains I thought would be a whole lot valuable than what they closed. I also noticed that a lot of country names have been grabbed already if not all and I wonder if the returns on these country.me domains will even be worth the money and effort. Unless you have a clever tourism promotion in mind for the country.me domain you just got, I doubt if it will ever be useful for anybody especially if the country name you grabbed don't have much of a tourism industry.

Nevertheless, here's the few sold dot me domains that I've come across I thought would have been worth shelling out a few more hundred. They're easily identifiable, brandable and has enough "versatility" to cover more than just one niche.

expert.me (very broad scope & can be used to establish reputation)
publicize.me ( press releases )
customize.me (very broad scope for customization services)
qualify.me (loan applications and others that require qualifications)
raffle.me ( contests!)
activate.me (I'm out of ideas... fill it in for me)

When, buying a .me domain, I believe one should have at least a rough idea of what can be done with the domain and not just because the keywords have high search volume. Some of the .me domains I've come across are definitely a total waste because of poor decision making.

I came and checked back with the .me domain auctions today and I'm quite bit in awe as to how ridiculously high the bids have gone since July 21 not even a full month so far. Most ridiculous is toyota.me sold for just over US$90K. I seriously doubt that the Brazilian who bought the domain can keep it for very long though. As soon as Toyota wants that domain, he can be dragged into a prolonged legal battle which will see himself the loser in the end. I'd say he's lucky if he gets the $90K back. Nevertheless, the .me domain auction I should has been a resounding success proven by the total worth of the most sought after .me domains both active and sold. The domains that reached the 4 figure range (both in the active auction and recently sold) have grossed $567,120 while those that reached 5 figures reached $951,822. This puts the total revenue from these domains to reach over $1 million dollars easy.

Some of the other .me domain bidders that might have gone a little over board with wanting theirs are the one who won these domains. Please note that I write this because other than the cool message it brings, I see no commercial value to these dot me domains.

only.me - sold for $33,405 ( then what?)
aweso.me - sold for $24,189 ( I'm tired of this already!)
volu.me - sold for $10,605
rape.me - sold for $12,015 ( sounds very creepy )

Same thing for these dot me domains that are is active in the auctions:

youand.me - currently high bid $3,566
inco.me - currently high bid $1,545 (as good as this sounds, I don't the search engines will recognize)
ani.me - currently high bid $8,020

On the positive side, here's a few .me domains in the auctions I thought should be worthy of high bids because of its commercial value or message.

verify.me
tip.me
purchase.me ( the long version of buy.me)
insure.me

As always, verb-related .me domains rule! While .me domain hacks are slowly losing steam.

The recently concluded auction of toyota.me have shown that the bidding process has been a big show of contrast. Quite a few bloggers have noted that the auctions has been like watching grass grow yet some .me domains like toyota.me had been sold in just a few days. Toyota.me, as a matter of fact, is the most expensive .me domain sold in the auction yet.

In my opinion, the .me domain auction rules might be a like skewed towards its profitability. The 24 hour extension after a new higher bid virtually perpetuates the drag and it is not that exciting to watch. But then again this set-up also test the motivation of the bidders, not to mention the depth or their pockets and their auction skills.

Look for trademark names and verb-related .me domains to continue to be the most sought after .me domains.

Today I make an small analysis on what .me domains are fetching good prices. I'm sure some observers and especially those who already bought their .me domains would be interested in finding out what are the relative values for their investments. In no way I'm an expert at domain appraisal. These are basically just observations from the ongoing .me domain auctions.

Based on the top 25 .me domains in the auctions today, I categorized these .me domains as verb-related, geography related and .me domain hack. Verb-related .me's are domains such as hug.me, cast.me and recruit.me. Geo .me domains are Vegas.me, Kuwait.me and China.me. Business are names of established businesses especially large companies like toyota.me and facebook.me. Personal are .me domains referring the the author of the domain like only.me and just.me. And last are hack .me domains like aweso.me, volu.me and cri.me all single words ending in .me. Below is the aggregated bid prices as of my last checking.
It does seem like a tight contest between verbs and businesses. Verb-related .me domains are great and they sound promising while business-related dot me domains are probably being driven by companies who forgot to protect their names and domain squatters who are looking to cash in on other people's names. I think hacks are under performing. They look nice but I think there's hardly any good possible returns on the investment. I think buyers of .me domain hacks are more likely to get disappointed with their purchases later on but hey anything is possible. It only takes one aweso.me .me domain to get rich, right?

That's what I'm trying to figure out today when I found out that oglasi.me has overtaken insure.me in the .me domain auctions. From my initial snooping around oglasi is a Serbian word has something to do with car windshields. I guess the auto glass business in eastern Europe is doing very well that's why there's a good number of bidders willing to shell out serious dough for it. Doing a quick Google search, it does seem like there's ready market for oglasi.me. The word oglasi comes out with over 14 million search results and around 7 established businesses showing up in the top 10 of search engine results possibly interested with this .me domain. I won't be surprised if they're the ones driving this .me domain auction surge.

Just to give you guys a good picture of how lucrative oglasi.me looks, it took 18 days for insure.me to get to $40,000 auction price while oglasi.me only took 1 day.

Here are the possible auction drivers fighting it out for oglasi.me. If not they are ready market for this .me domain.

oglasi.com
autooglasi.biz
oglasiplus.com
alioglasi.in.rs
fotoglasi.com
halooglasi.co.yu

Check out the .me domain auctions to see the action.

One of the most important things a business owner should do is always protect his brand from willing opportunists. Forgetting to register your .me domain name ahead of time is definitely not smart business. One good example of a huge company forgetting to register their their .me domain is twitter.com. According to a popular tech site valleywag.com, it seems the guys behind twitter had a major slip up and forgot to register twitter.me considering their brand is one of the hottest verb-terms around these days. Now, twitter.me really sounds like an awesome name and twitter.com will definitely have to dig deep in their pockets to acquire it else be involved in an unnecessary legal battle just to get it. Either way, their paying. It's like they're waiting to get punked!

Here's a few more company's who probably just didn't care for their brand name. Either these guys weren't in on things things or they just forgot to take advantage of the .me domain sunrise period months ago. Either way, they may have or would be paying much more than what they should have spent by reserving their .me domain name.

Myspace.me
Baidu.me
Mitsubishi.me
Disney.me
Tyco.me
Lastminute.me

Would these companies even care that somebody else have their .me domains? Sure they do. So Business Sense 101: Don't let domain squatters muscle you off your property. Don't even give them a chance to make money out of you and your .me domain.

The shear numbers have shown the way and the future looks bright for the .me domains of Montenegro. A recent PR release from the businesswire.com reveals that in a little over 2 weeks since the start of open registration, there had already been over 100,000 dot me domains registered. This puts estimates conservatively to hit one million .me domains in less than half a year!

Registrations have come mostly from the U.S. with 7 out of 10 registrations coming from the land of milk and honey. Way behind but coming in second in the registrations is the U.K. with just 6% of the total registrations. Canada, Australia and Israel make up the top 5 countries that registered .me's with a combined total of 7%. Registrar www.GoDaddy.com has proven to be the favorite registrar of most people with over half of the 100,000 .me domains registered through them.

I'm surprised not to see Spain or other Latin countries not figure in the numbers here considering the word "me" is a comprehensible word in their language. The same for Italy. But I won't be surprised to see these countries catch up as the popularity of .me domains snowball some more in the coming days.

If there's one good measure of how the .me domains extension's appeal to the general public is the amount people have been spending or are willing to spend for these pieces of internet "real estate."

The ongoing dot me domain auctions have been getting real serious action with the top 25 .me domains raking in bids totaling $185,743 already. At the same time, the top 25 dot me domains that have already been sold in the same auction totals $146,404. These numbers are significant considering the real premium reserved dot me domains haven't been included in this auction yet. Those will be auctioned sometime in September according o some insiders.

The real performers in this auction are insure.me for $30,005, hug.me for $14,015 and onlinecasino.me for $10,005. Top dollars were also shelled out for these .me domains already sold; lasvegas.me for $15,015, chatwith.me for $15,035 and picture.me for $10,240. Check out the current top 10 .me domains in the auctions below.
As of the most recent count, over 50,000 .me domains have already been sold by different accredited registrars mostly through www.GoDaddy.com.