Gather them all...

Once, the idea for Googawho had been hashed out and the domain was registered, I decided that it was time to start gathering the names of other like-sounding domains and attempting to get those registered as well. This is pretty common, but not always as simple as it might sound. I found that the name Googahoo.com had already been registered to someone in London. That was a real bummer at first. It meant that this person not only had the domain I need, but they may also have had a very similar idea to the one that I had already put so much work into.

Well I noticed right away that the current owner was only squatting on the name and had been doing so for over a year. With a little more research I was able to find some contact information for the owner of Googahoo.com, a fellow named Romano. So I sent Romano a quick message explaining that I was building out a site called Googawho.com and I had already reserved the .net and .org versions of the Googahoo domain, and how I thought that adding Googahoo.com to the list of domains that point to my site would add to the success of my project, Oh, and uh, by the way, would you take $XXX for the name? But alas I never heard back Romano, that is until I decided to do a search on Facebook, and what do you know, I found him! I contacted him again through FB and the next day he responded that he wasn't using it, and would be willing to sell it.

So we had a deal. Now here is where the whole process got a bit interesting. I guess that I was just a bit surprised that he was willing to sell, and at being presented with the daunting question... "now what?"

Well as it turns out there are third parties who handle almost the entire transaction for you. I chose NetworkSolutions, mostly because they were only company offering the service that I had ever heard of. But the whole transaction was pretty straight forward. I just had to set up an account with NetworkSolutions handing over all of my contact information and credit card number, which they would charge $19 to just to make the offer. And that they did via e-mail that same night. They kept me posted every fews hours with Email alerts letting me know how things were progressing. Romano accepted and got paid, and I got the googahoo.com domain all to myself.

Here is the current list of domains that point to googawho.com

googawho.net,org
googahoo.com,net,org
googafoo.com,net,org
searchawho.com,net,org
phatdocs.com - its a long story...