This truly is the business to get into in 2005. It's a red hot opportunity that savvy investors can make a killing on when you know how. And this article will walk you step-by-step through the money-making process. Don't be put off by the term "investors". I'm not talking big money down here. As long as you've got a spare '5 a week then great money can be made for only half an hour of your time. Like the sound of that? Thought so. There's a few ways you can make money buying domain names and selling them on for profit. And I mean PROFIT. You'll see why people will be scratching at your door to buy off you in just a moment. Let's start with the basics. All domain names are only registered for a limited amount of time.Registrars can choose to use the name for a period of between 1-10 years. After this the rights to these domain names expire and the user has to renew the name again. If they don't do this it will be placed on hold for a short time and then deleted. This means it is then availible for anyone who wants to buy it! This Is Where You Can Cash In! 20,000 expired domain names are made availible each and every day. Some of them are very attractive and well-established names. Example. Last year the owners of Race.com carelessly didn't renew their registration fee. It was grabbed (the term used to describe purchasing an expired name) by a savvy 'investor' for a few pounds and sold for thousands and thousands back to the old owner. The owner was willing to pay huge sums for to the investor because he had built up qualified traffic over X amount of years and didn't want to lose all the previous custom. Now I admit that making a sale for thousands is rare, but is certainly possible. The likeliness is that you can buy a domain name and register it for '5-'50 and then sell it on for anything from '150 - '1000. Do this with five domain names a week, and your looking at a big sum of money for only a couple of hours work. It's not just businesses that have carelessly let their domain name that will buy off you. It's other businesses too that will buy the name to get the old owners' traffic. It's a legitamate way of increasing your customer base. And if the old owner and a new potential owner get into a bidding war...well..the sky really is the limit. So there's two main reasons why people will be willing to pay YOU a couple of hundred pounds for a domain name. a) They carelessly let the domain name expire. That means that they will pay you to get the name back to ensure that they don't lose their existing traffic that they may have built up over years and years. B) They are a business in the same field as the one that has let the name expire and therfore will pay you to secure the exisitng custom of a rival. Here's step-by-step how you go about this fantastically profitable part time business. There are several sources of expired domain name information and reserach tools, some free and some that require a payment of a fee. www.wehavethem.com supplies lists of names due to be deleted. Www.DeletedDomains.com allows you to do some searching free and more extensive searching for a $99 annual fee.You can search for names that are due to be deleted and also allows you to bid on newly deleted names that have already been grabbed by other 'investors'. What you are looking for is an expired domain name with traffic in the last month of anything over 1500. Ensure that the site is an actual consumer site. There's no point buying a domain name if the previous site wasn't selling any goods. If you see a site that had tens of thousands of visitors in the last month GET IT. The likeliness is that the previous owners will be itching to get their name back off of you due to its obvious success. Also if you see a name with a large qualified traffic thats due to expire and has a high traffic volume use an automated grabbing system such as www.snapnames.com and www.pool.com. These will ensure the second they become availible you will have registered them. The cost is about $60 but only if they get the names for you. Definately worth it in my eyes. Remember you could easily sell the name for hundreds, maybe thousands. In part 2 we'll take a look at how you go about selling the names once you have acquired them. But in the mean time here's a few domain names which were up for sale at the time of writing this article. Now obviously not all names sell for this much, but it's a very real possibility that you could stumble across a gem in your business. my.com $750,000 lovelife.com $350,000 fights.net $16,000 diet.us $35,000 askdoctors.com $7,500 dietary.info $6,000 lovemaking.info $10,000 textmeassage.net $17,000 ejobmarket.com $1,800 smokers.tv $5,000 teens.org $22,000 raregifts,com $20,000 The profits in this business are like no other. Now it's your turn to get your hands on your share in the billion dollar industry of buying and selling domain names. Until next time... Jonathan Street |
