The overture keyword suggestion tool once was very popular for finding domains with traffic even before the domains were registered. If you didn’t already know, it works like this. When users have a toolbar using yahoo search installed, they sometimes type the domain into this instead of the address bar of the browser. Both the main domain and also misspellings of it will register as keywords in the overture tool. This makes it possible for domainers to check for alot of misspellings of many domains, buy the ones with traffic, and monetize them with parking programs.
Nowadays this tool is almost constantly down or very very slow, probably due to overload.

So what to use now instead? Maybe paid keyword tools would do it? I haven’t tried.

What I have tried is the AdWords Keyword Tool. Just enter the domains you want to check and see if they get any traffic. What’s bad is that it doesn’t give you any exact numbers as the ovt tool does, instead it just gives you bars with different widths. So what I did to get some sense out of it was to compare the widths of these bars with actual visitor numbers for some of my parked domains. For the domains I already own, it provided some reliable results. Here’s a table of my results:

Since I started writing this article some days ago, I did find some domains with a bar width of 8 pixels or more, which would according to my test above bring enough traffic to make some money. I registered 2 domains with a bar of 8 px and one with 11px. But how dissapointed were I when it turned out they got very little traffic! All three get less than 10 visitors a day!

But if you want to use this method although my bad results, how do you get the pixel width of these bars in a fast way? If you can’t measure just once and then remember the widths in your head, you could use the extension firebug for firefox. Just turn it on and click inspect, hover your mouse over the bar and you will see the width as in this screenshot:

The best thing to do at all is of course to automate the whole thing with some coding.

Here are some pros and cons of this
Pros:
Much faster than the overture tool, you can check multiple domains at once
Doesn’t “correct” misspellings to show the data for the real domain, like overture does sometimes
Updates more often than the overture tool, whose data often is months behind

Cons:
Doesn’t give any exact numbers
Very unreliable results when trying to find new domains
Harder to automate than the overture tool
Treats hyphens and spaces as the same char, just like overture