Home Based Business Center

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you know where to sell domain names there is money in buying and selling them. When I first heard this I was shocked. Since I already “owned” a couple of domain names I already knew that one never truly owns a domain name. It is far more accurate to say that you lease a domain. Sure this can be a life time lease, you can even transfer it to your children before you die, but the reality is that it’s yours only so long as you pay the yearly fee to hold onto it.

What still shocks me is that domain names go for thousands and even millions of dollars every year. So why would anyone pay $10,000 to lease a domain name? Lots of reasons; they want it for their company name, they can put it up as a web page and make money off ads, even vanity if it is their personal name, but clearly the main reason is that they intend to make money from it in some manner.

So can you just go out and register a domain name and sell it. You might be able to. By chance, I once purchased a domain name that I was going to monetize with ads just a couple of days before someone who had already built a business around the name, but hadn’t secured the domain yet. He came to me with an offer for the domain to use with his business and I sold it to him for $900.00. Since I bought the domain for $9.00 that was a great profit for very little work. For something like this to happen you either have to be lucky or know what you’re looking for. That time I was just plain old lucky.

The truth is that almost all the truly great names have been bought. You’re about as likely to find a brand new super profitable name as you are to find a hundred dollar bill on your next walk around the neighborhood. It could happen, but it’s not going to happen very often. In the first place, all the one word domains from the English dictionary have been taken. All the 3 and 4 letter combinations have been bought up too, as have all the valuable two word combinations and pretty much every combination of popular names and surnames.

So, if all of these have been bought up how is it that someone can buy and sell domain names for a profit? Well many of them will come back on the market, and that’s your chance to buy them and resell them. Some are going to be out of your price range, but others may be well within your price range. In addition, there are lots of names that have never been registered before that wont fetch you $10,000.00 but they’ll get you $100 to $2000.

The next thing a new buyer or as they are most frequently referred to “Domainer” needs to ask is how do you know if a domain is worth anything. There are several factors to take into account. Among them are the length of the domain, its commercial value, its type in traffic, whether it is a .com, .net, .info, .biz or whatever, how old it is and how many links exist to it are all that can, and are taken into account when determining the value of the domain.

Is it a single word? If the answer is yes, then it’s profitable. But how much is it worth. That’s anyone’s guess, but a very general rule of thumb is the more traffic there is for that word the more it’s worth. Sex.com for example recently sold for $14 million. The word “sex” shows up 432,000,000 times in Google. On the other hand Betrayal.com recently went for $9,302.00 with “betrayal” showing up 11,500,000 in Google and pusher.com went for $6,100 just the other day with 4,430,000 references in Google. Obviously there’s a lot more to it than this and I wouldn’t recommend you go on a buying spree based on how many pages the term shows up on in Google. Sex has a lot more commercial value than betrayal or pusher and this is certainly a much better predictor of value.

Even though there are a limited number of single word domains there are many attractive two and three word terms. Might someone go looking specifically for leather purses or laptop bags? Of course, and there is good commercial value in such terms. At this point in time the outer limmit of for most domain buyers is three words and the three word terms need to be good.

Another factor is how much type in traffic there is. That is to say how often people type the term directly into their browser address bar bypassing a search engine. Even though you and I might never do this, it happens all the time. Obviously, the more common the term and the shorter the term the more likely it is to happen, so these words and terms become valuable. And, since “photography” is typed into a browser fairly frequently it’s fair to assume that “phtography” also gets typed in by mistake, so common misspellings of one word domains are somewhat valuable.

Since .com was the first on the scene and is the most well known, and still gets preferential treatment from some search engines it is the most valuable top level domain (TLD). This doesn’t mean that you can’t show up just as well in some search engines with a .org, .net or .edu extension, but they aren’t going to fetch the same price tag. In fact some auctions for domains won’t even allow non .com’s in.

Age is another determinant of a domains worth. The longer it has been around the better. More specifically, if it is under three years old it is unlikely to have a significant commercial value. The reason for this is at least in part that search engines favor urls that have been around for longer periods of time.

A personal preference and not one that there would be universal agreement on is that the domain has links coming back at it. The more the better and the older those links the better. I also like it if it is listed in dmoz and the yahoo directory. These give the site a leg up.

And where can you find domain names for sale? There are plenty of places. Snapnames.com holds auctions and allows you to backorder names you might like in case they expire. They also have a tool for allowing you to search for names that may be coming up for sale. Using their tool you can narrow your search to specific keywords, tld’s, number of characters, whether a domain is expired or deleting soon, and you can weed out domains with hyphens and numbers. The tool that I prefer is DomainTools advanced auction tool In addition to the criteria that snapnames lets you search DomainTools also allows you to search for only those names that are in dmoz and/or the yahoo directory. This doesn’t matter to everyone and depending on how you plan to make money from your domain it may not matter to you. I’ll save why it matters to me for another post, so suffice it to say, for now, that I just like that option. There are lots of other places to search for domains. Sedo, Afternic, and Sitepoint and Digitalpoint just to name a few and they are often the same places you can turn around and sell the domain name if that’s what your plan is. Personally that’s not my primary way of making money with them, but it is a possibility.

You can always go straight to the owner of a domain and ask to buy it and this could be the just like antiques not everyone knows the value of what they’re sitting on, but chances are this isn’t going to be as fruitful for you as some other methods. The upside, of course is that you could get a name without all the competition.

If all this has you thinking about the possibilities let me recommend you first get some more information. There’s a great ebook called How I Sell Domain Names: A weekend crash course that you can get by Clicking Here

One note of caution - I find domain buying and selling addicting, so please be careful.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS