Profiting from domain names – the complete how-to guide

Profiting from domain names – the complete how-to guide – Part 2, Search for domains within your budget

Tags: Business, Domaining, Features, Insights, afternic, auction, buy domains, dnforum, domain, domain names, domaining, domainstate, expired domains, pool, sedo, snapnames

Making money from domains, what do I need to do?

Establish your budget
Search for domains within your budget
1. Expired domains
2. Registered domains
3. Typo domains
Researching the domain
Purchasing the domain
Monetise the domain
1. Parking
2. Selling Traffic
3. Affiliate Programs
Fast Start
Exit Strategy

Search for domains within your budget

This is the hard part; I’ll start with expired domains.

Lots of people have lists of domains that are dropping (expiring) on a daily basis but do you really have the time to sit down and research every single domain one at a time when there are over 20k domains every day? No.

To sort through them all you have a few options, if you know what you want, for example you only want domains with a certain keyword, then go straight to snapnames.com, search for upcoming auctions and enter your keyword. Snapnames is free to and bidding on domains can start as low as $9.

If you’re like me and are just on the lookout for domains that have traffic, pagerank, backlinks or directory listings in DMOZ etc, then I suggest using some search tools that are out there.

The problem with expiring domains is that you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad, what has traffic and what doesn’t, there’s no seller to talk to, so you can’t easily get traffic stats and referrer data, you’re flying blind unless you have the right tools and even with the tools you’re still taking a risk.

Here are your options for finding expiring domains.

The first I’d recommend looking at is odditysoftware’s free expired domain list, they have a daily break down of expired domains, they also give you the option of sorting by Alexa, PageRank, Google backlinks, Yahoo backlinks, MSN backlinks or just alphabetically so you can go through the list manually.

The next resource you can try is cheaphostingdirectory.com, they have a list of expired domains with traffic that they email out to you, and they also have a small list on their site. The list is limited, and the email is a paid for service but the list is worth a look at from time to time.

There are also web based services that have monthly subscriptions that I’ve found, at the lower end of the scale is namespy.com and registercompass.com, their sites look a bit dodgy, I’m not a fan of the 1 page sales landing page with free offers, but the screenshots of their web based applications look to be good, I haven’t tried these myself but the screenshots look like what you need to find expiring domains with traffic.

Another service is snapcheck.com, I’ve heard some good things about their system, they are one of the bigger players in the market too apparently, their service is $49.95 a month but by the looks of the data they provide it’s worth it.

And dropwatch.com, they are cheaper then snapcheck.com and I have a feeling they get their data from them, don’t quote me on that though. They offer basically the same services as snapcheck, and they charge $35 a month.

I’ve also found some Windows based software, I’ve actually found a handful but the 2 good ones I’ve come across are Expired Domain Sleuth and Domain Research Tool.

They both work in basically the same way, you need to download a list of domains that are dropping which you can get from all over the place, for example, clupdrop.com give you daily lists, register for free and you get access to them, or you can grab a 5 day list of domains deleting from pool.com.

Once you have the list of names in their application, you can start filtering the domains by any criteria really, length, backlinks, page rank etc.

The application will query every domain to find out all the data on the domains real time, they’ll check search engines for backlinks, they do everything really.

Expired Domain Sleuth looks like a good application; it’s only $69.95 onetime fee, or $29.95 a month which gives you some more functionality.

Domain Research Tool is a bit more advanced, it can manage your portfolio of domains, it monitors bids on domains, estimates value, and it even can send automated offers for domains. All this extra power comes at a cost though, the price tag is $249.99, but it’s a once off fee so if you are investing for the long term, it’ll work out cheaper.

In my opinion, I’d get started with snapcheck.com or dropwatch.com, the initial outlay is minimal and they give you all the data you’re going to need to research your domain.

Okay, so you’ve now got a tool to search for domains that are expiring, you can use them to find a domain and research its history, in part 3 I’ll explain how to research your domain some more, but for now here’s how to find already registered domains.

Finding Registered Domains

Registered domains are domains that someone already owns and may have already monetised to some extent and is willing to offload that domain for a price.

Where do you find these? Well it’s much easier than finding a good expiring domain that’s for sure!

The best places I like to look are on forums, you can at least talk to the owner, get some background on the domain, some screenshots of previous month’s traffic and revenue and negotiate a price with them.

Here’s a list of forums that are popular for domain name sales:

The best forums there would be DNForum.com and DomainState.com, be sure to have a look around those at least.

The other place you can find domains is from domain brokers and registrars that buy domains for the intention to sell.

Here’s my list:

Finding a registered domain is much easier then looking for a good dropped domain; the only hard part is sorting through each website and finding something that fits your budget.

Finding a typo domain

It’s easy to generate typos for a popular domain, but it’s time consuming to find out if every variation is available. There’s a handful of places out there that can generate a list of typos, here’s two I use, seobook.com has a typo generator with some options but my preference is the webmastertoolkit.com typo generator, it works really well and gives you a link to check availability.

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