How does becoming wealthier than Frank Schilling sound? Schilling, the most successful individual domainer in the world, has a portfolio of about 300,000 names, estimated revenue of $20 million dollars per year, and has received several 9-figures offers for his portfolio. Yet according to long-time IDN investor and IDN expert David Wrixon, “[t]here are IDN investors out there that will make Frank Schilling look like an amateur.”

When it comes to making money in domaining, there are many strategies. But if you are looking to capitalize on one strategy that holds a lot of potential, you should check out IDNs. Although you may never be as successful as Schilling, the timing for getting into IDNs is good.

What is an IDN?

IDN stands for “International Domain Name.” The normal domains that you are used to using are all written with the standard ASCII characters with which we are familiar – the letters A to Z, the numbers 0 to 9, and the hyphen. That works well for English, but the fact is that even though English is the language of international commerce, the native tongue of most of the world is not English. Even in many European languages, there are characters that aren’t used in English such as à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô û ù ü ÿ. Moving further afield, Russian and other East European languages use a Cyrillic alphabet. Then, of course, languages like Chinese and Japanese use characters with which we aren’t even familiar. And some languages – such as Arabic and Hebrew – are further complicated by the fact that people write them right to left.

To deal with all of these languages, a system has developed to translate foreign characters into standard ASCII characters via an algorithm known as Punycode. These characters are then preceded by the prefix “xn--“. This process can of course be reversed, and the name can be recoded.

The driving idea behind IDNs is that people want to use their own language on the internet, even if they know English. The basic investment concept behind IDNs is that as more and more people in non-English countries take to the internet, and as browsers support IDNs better, IDNs will be adopted more and more. It’s time to get in early before the widespread adoption of IDNs, while the prices are still cheap.

Here are some tips, tools and techniques so that you can get started investing in international domain names. I have also interviewed David Wrixon, one of the world’s most knowledgeable IDN experts, who has shared some of his wisdom.