I also found outbound quite hard on .co and stopped doing it.
Inbound is a numbers game and it's reasonably resource heavy in both investment and time.
I've developed a specific strategy that drives my buying/regging decisions. On the whole, it ignores one word vs two words and focuses on a range of other factors, many of which are detailed in this post:
https://www.namepros.com/threads/report-completed-domain-name-sales-here.83628/page-567#post-6484675
I'd love to provide a specific step-by-step guide to how I do it, but that will dilute any small advantage that I have
However, I'll do my best to explain in more detail.
The purpose of the method is to look for .co domains that have a higher propensity to sell. To estimate sale-propensity, I've hypothesised that propensity increases with the likelihood of a domain pairing against the name of an existing business entity. This means going beyond traditional keywords and focusing more on business names that are widely used. (Note: this doesn't ever mean going after a specific businesses, especially a trademarked or unique brand. It is simply the search for a generic word or set of words that is commonly used as a business name).
With that in mind, if you have one word rather than two, it generally increases the breadth of application and reduces specificity. However, sometimes that exactness contains that brand value and those two words have more meaning than one alone. Eg. Cold vs ColdWallet
In the list shared above by
@AbdulBasit.com , the domains 'StockBridge', 'BookKeep' and 'BrightMedia' mean nothing to me but they came up in my daily search list. I manually validate around 30 domains each day from this filter (search list). It takes between 1 and 3 minutes per domain in the list and I end up buying between 5 to 15.
As an example: during validation, the data says that Stockbridge is taken in most major tlds and there are 25+ matching business names on Linkedin (ignoring any companies that haven't uploaded a logo).
A quick search on the People tab on Twitter shows that it's also surname. The disambiguation page on Wikipedia (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockbridge) lists a range of locations in UK & US that also share this name, so the potential business count increases because lots of business names include city/town/village. A final search on Google (for stockbridge*.co*) validates it's occurrence on/within a range of domains across the first two or three pages. Even if it isn't an existing entity that buys the domain, the broad usage of the term within company names also gives a higher likelihood that in the future, new entities might also contain 'stockbridge' in their name.
For me, when a domain isn't a .com, it doesn't matter that a domain is keyword rich or has great PPC.
I also expect the value of direct type-in traffic to any .co to be minimal. The importance of keywords in the domain for SEO/SERP ranking is debatable as well, so I focus away from that too.
My experience has been that if the .co doesn't match a generic business name, it makes it harder to sell. This is true even if it is keyword rich and/or highly descriptive of the primary activity or product of the business.
Linking some additional things that I've previously shared about .co below:
https://www.namepros.com/threads/dot-co-confusion.1033963/#post-6293060
Lastly, don't forget that it's still a numbers game... whether you have 100 domains or 10,000. So the method above improves my inventory sell-through-rate but I still have plenty of domains that I reg which end up getting dropped or renewed at a higher cost!