PPC marketing when done right can be very profitable, I have developed my own PPC reporting tools in Excel that are pretty damn advanced if I may say so myself (that’s what I used to do for a living, develop business intelligence tools that integrate with 3^rd party systems) with the help of these tools I can track my PPC campaigns on Google and Yahoo and compare the results over a few pages (lots of graphs and analytics so it takes up about 5 tabs in Excel).

The datasets I create are very informative, for example I not only know my ROI, but I know my ROI based on my GM (ROI – return on investment, GM – gross margin), on top of that I know all my click through rate, my click through to subscribe rate & cost, and my click to sale rate & cost.

The management tools I have are so good I’m able to give clients better data then the advertising companies provide, which enables me to charge a nice management fee of 40% of revenue spent. For e.g. if a client spends $10k, my bill is $4k. Might sound hefty but wait till the end and you’ll know why it’s not all that bad of an investment.

Here’s some data of mine, I’m not going to include all the graphs etc, just the small breakdown that gives an indication of the campaign for this month.

Campaign performance

Here we can see the totals and averages for the month, we have the number of clicks on the ad, subscribers to the site, sales we did, total revenue from the sales, the total gross margin of those sales, the ROI from the gross margin and the gross margin ROI as a percentage. Se were making close to a 300% ROI on our gross margins, and about 700% ROI on sales. I think It’s important to look at your ROI from your gross margins not from your sales, I’ll explain that in a different blog post.

Conversion Summary

These are the conversion summaries of the clicks, so our click through rate on the ads we use is on average 11.5%, of the 11.5% on average 2.9% subscribe, and 2.6% make a purchase.

Cost Summary

This is one of my favourite parts, this is our cost summary, in total in the month we spent over $11k on the campaign, with an average of $0.40 cents per click, and of those clicks we got the most we paid for a subscriber was $67, expensive! But all in all were paying $17 for a subscriber, bear in mind newsletter subscribers are worth lots of money, at times the newsletter itself can make thousands, we push the cost we’re paying for these subscribers into our newsletter reporting so we know our cost of the newsletter and ROI for it etc, those subscribers don’t magically appear at no cost.

We also paid $100 to make one sale; we probably went a couple of days without a sale but that’s not big deal unless your campaign is costing your heaps without any return, the average cost for a sale was $24 and our total money spent for the month as mentioned before was just over $11k.

The results

So after spending $11k in one month on a PPC marketing campaign across Google, and Yahoo we could be pretty scared at the result especially after seeing the most we spent to get a sale was $100 and the average cost of a product sold is $99!

But our stats tell us exactly how we went, we spent $11k, but our gross profits were $34k. The most we paid for a sale was $100, but all in all we sold $76k worth of products, I’m sure when you talk to lots of these PPC marketing companies they’ll tell you that the campaign was awesome and you make a 700% ROI, really your just being lied to and your lying to yourself if you think that, you need to base your facts on what counts and that’s your gross margins, our GM ROI was 300% pretty good still, after costs we made a healthy profit of $22k.

If I was a client of myself, my total costs would have been $15k, with a profit of closer to $18k, slightly less but don’t forget you just moved almost $80k of stock in a month, that’s sure to help your buying power to bring your margins down more and really, you still make $18k profit so why not go again? Oh and not forget you’ve also just increase your customer base and subscribers to your newsletter that also brings in heaps of revenue.

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

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

Oh how I love exit strategies, almost everything I do has an exit strategy, personally I think you need an end goal or else you’re going to have all these domains lying around some that are dying some that are still doing well. Having an exit strategy will help you to be more focused on what you set out to achieve in the first place.

An exit strategy isn’t all about the exit either, it’s also about having some goals you need to achieve in order to not exit, and if you don’t achieve them, then yeah, cut your losses and bail out.

For domianing an exit strategy should be simple, let’s do some math.

If you invested $400 in a domain and you’re giving the domain 10 months to breakeven (time is up to you), your domain needs to return you at least $40 a month, every month or else it’s not going to stay in the black. (black is positive, red is negative in relation to finance).

I make a decision early on that if my domain isn’t making at least 80% of the 10 month breakeven cost ($40 is our 10 month breakeven cost) a month then it’s going to take too long for me to turn a profit and I’ll auction the domain off somewhere.

I won’t just cut it loose after 1 month, I’ll give the domain a grace period of 3 months; if it drops below that 80% for 3 months consistently then that’s when I’ll auction it. In that 3 month period I’ll try some other things, I usually park my domains so I’ll change to a different domain parking company, or I’ll see if there’s any interest out there for people wanting to buy links on it – but I’m pretty lazy, selling and managing links takes effort, so I usually just change parking companies.

If your domain is making you good money above your breakeven point you have the choice of holding onto the domain until it starts to hit diminishing returns (starts to not profit like it used to) and then you would auction it off, or you can do like what I do and hold onto a domain for 4-8 months and then sell it anyway once I have proof of profits and consistency to give the domain a really good auction price.

You can then use the cash injection to buy lots of small domains, or take the risk on some bigger ones.

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

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

Fast Start

Okay, so you’re too lazy to read everything, I understand, I’m the same… How do you think I feel writing it all?

Here’s a simple fast start guide.

Buy yourself a domain with traffic, your options are a high risk domain that’s expiring, or an already registered domain, a domain that’s dropping will be cheaper but again, it’s high risk.

I have made a list of places to buy domains that are dropping, and a list of places to buy from that are registered domains.

Once you’ve acquired the domain, park it at a domain parking company, they will put up a page for you that has links and a search box that you make money from, they’ll pay you and you can just sit back and watch the cash come in.

After a few months where you’ve established that the domain can make money, hit the forums and auction the domain off for a tidy profit!

Sounds simple eh? Maybe you should read the whole thing from the start! Good luck!

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

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

Monetise the domain

So we’ve finally got to the fun part. This is great for me after writing for 3 days creating 11 pages and over 4,000 words which I’ll have to edit down to so much less!

Okay so you have some options here, I’m going to start first up with parking.

Parking your domain for cash is a simple and effective way of monetising your domain, it’s really simple and there’s lots of options.

When you park a domain with a company, they put a generic page on your domain that’s full of links and most of the time a search box all of which earns money. The generic page is based on a template, you can usually choose a template you like and that’s really about it, the rest is up to your traffic. The more traffic you have going to the domain, the more links that searches that are going to get done and the more money you can make.

This is sedo’s example of a parked domain.

To get started the first thing you need to do is work out who you’re going to use to park your domain.

Here’s my list of domain parking companies:

• Sedo.com
• NameDrive.com
• Parked.com
• Godaddy.com
• iMonetize.com
• ActiveAudience.com
• Google.com
• DomainSponsor.com

They all have pros and cons, for example Godaddy take 40% unless you pay a $9.99 a month membership, and if you do they only take 20%. NameDrive are one of the better ones out there, they have really good looking landing pages, one of the bigger programs out there is DomainSponsor.com, they take 50% of revenue but they ‘auto-optimise’ the templates to place the better performing keywords in better positions.

The best thing to do is to I find is to sign up to just about off of them, rotate the domain around to a few different ones and see how it goes, stick with the one that’s converting well and paying out well.

If you don’t want to give away a percentage of the click profits to a 3^rd party you could always sell the traffic going to the domain, or sell ads on the domain yourself.

This is a common practice, since the domain has traffic going to it you can redirect all that traffic direct to someone else for a price per thousand or you could just build your own landing page and put some Google AdSense ads on it.

Typically if you’re going to redirect the traffic, you will need to know what type of traffic the site is getting, if the domain is legal-help.com, then it’s obvious, you’re getting people who are after legal help, so you could advertise in forums that you have legal help traffic for sale. This has the potential to be high yield since its targeted traffic for the buyer, otherwise if you don’t know what the traffic is, for example the domain is aaaupdown.com then you’re going to have a hard time selling whatever traffic it’s getting – you’re better off parking it.

If your domain has a good search engine result it might be worth building a few pages on the site relative to the search listing, make the pages very search engine friendly and add some Google ads – or sell the some links on the site and you might be lucky enough to retain the search listing and all the search traffic from it.

If you’ve bought a dropped domain Google’s pretty quick on killing any search listing it would have had, so don’t count on there being any long term search traffic.

You’re other option to monetising the domain is to send the traffic to an affiliate program, again this will only work if you know what kind of traffic you’re getting and the same applies above, either redirect the domain to your affiliate link, or build a page dedicated to selling the users on that affiliate program.

Something I like doing is redirecting traffic to multiple affiliate programs depending where they are from. For example I use a GEO-IP script to work out if the traffic is American, if so I’ll send them to an American express affiliate program, if the traffic is from China; I’ll send them to a Chinese affiliate program. This strategy can pay off at times if you’re redirecting people to sites that are in their local language rather to some generic English website.

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

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

Purchasing the domain

Purchasing a domain is usually a pretty easy practice, but buying an expired domain or an already registered domain proves to be much harder.

Buying expired domains can have a lot of risk associated with them, but with high risk comes high returns so it’s not all bad.

You tend to find already registered domains go for much higher amounts then domains that are expiring; this is mostly because the owner can show a proven track record of revenue and traffic, and the owner has already taken the risk on the domain if the domain was a domain that dropped (bought from an expired domain auction). Expired domains tend not go for as much, but, they can be pretty high risk, you can end up easily investing $2k on a single domain that’s dropping that has traffic and end up next month with no traffic.

One of the best ways I find to acquire domains is through snapnames.com, you can bid in all of the domains that are dropping today, and they have a great search facility for finding domains that have dropped or that are dropping soon, you can also search through their live auctions.

Another great way to acquire domains is via pool.com, they offer a backorder service to help you acquire domains that are dropping, it’s free to put a backorder on a domain and they even go one better with their service, if you deposit $250 with them as credit you can do the same that the big domain registrars do, you can kite / taste domain names for 4 and a half days for only $0.20c per domain.

When you taste the domain you pay the 20 cents plus the full registration fee of the domain which is only $8.20 for a .com, which is a bargain compared to afternic and clubdrop who charge like $30 for domain registration.

If you don’t like the domain and you can drop / release the domain before the 4 days is up, when you do, you get that registration fee refunded and the whole tasting of the domain only cost you $0.20 for those 4 days.

Moniker also does the same, they let you drop the domain within 4 days and charge $0.25. I’m sure other places are doing it, if not they will be soon but those are the two biggest I know of.

The final option I’d recommend is Godaddys domain name after market, they basically have one massive list of domains expiring for you to search through, and you can browse by the traffic each domain has received, bids on the domain, price, time left or by name.

All the domains on there are around 10 day auctions, it’s a simple drop list, buying is easy and you get to see the traffic that the domain has been getting. There is a small monthly membership fee however, if you’re a godaddy domain customer there’s ways of getting the aftermarket fee much cheaper.

If you’re buying an already registered domain from a company like sedo, moniker or afternic for example, it’s a simple secure process since they have control of the domains, where as if you’re buying a registered domain from an individual you need to be pretty careful you’re not giving your cash to someone who isn’t going to deliver the goods.

Here’s a list of places that sell domains that are either parked with them, or they are a broker:

• Namedrive.com
• Sedo.com
• Snapnames.com
• Moniker.com
• Impressivedomains.com

Some helpful hints on internet trading, never buy anything from anyone ever using egold, moneybookers or western union, 90% of the time it’s a scam so don’t bother. Using Paypal is a risk, if the domain is only cheap I usually just paypal it, if we’re talking money over $400 or so then I’ll use an escrow service.

Sedo offer an escrow service for domains and there’s always escrow.com, I use them from time to time.

Another hint is if you’re buying from someone on a forum, check their itrader rating, most forums have this little itrader rating; it’s basically feedback people have left about that person when they’ve done some kind of trade / business with them. It’s a good indication if the person is legit or out to make money fast and leave town.

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

• DNForum.com
• DomainState.com
• NamePros.com
• DigitalPoint.com
• v7n.com
• Webmaster-Talk.com

The best forums there would be DNForum.com and DomainState.com

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

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

Researching the domain

Okay so you’re now well equipped to find a domain, but once you’ve found one, then what? Research my friend; you need to know before you throw your money at a domain if it’s going to be worth it.

What makes it worth it? The value of a domain can vary on a few things, the age of the domain, if it’s a good type in name or if it’s ranked on a search engine (organic traffic that’s been around for a long time and will stay) or if the traffic is from links on other sites. There’s different risk associated with each, the search engine listing could drop, links could get deleted, anything could happen.

You find the more expensive names are the domains with lots of straight type in traffic, type in traffic tends to stay around for a long time and the domains are usually generic words, like income.com, career.com, hosting.com, hasselhoff.com – that kind of thing.

The defining factors for me are traffic, pagerank and DMOZ. To me it’s a 88% traffic, 10% pagerank and 2% DMOZ scale, if the traffic is high then I don’t care much about the other two, if the traffic is average but it has a good pagerank, like 4-5 or above, then I’ll still consider it, and if it has a DMOZ listing then yeah, maybe adds a little extra weight to my decision, but only if I’m going to build a website on the domain, if I’m going to park it to monetise it, then you’ll probably lose the DMOZ listing anyway so don’t worry about it.

Researching an expired domain is fairly easy, if you used the domain research tools in part 2 then you pretty much have all the information you need. The Alexa rank will give you an indication of the traffic; the domain tools give you the page rank and backlinks on all the major search engines. The big risk here is that the domain used to be attached to a website with keywords and all the rest, once you turn it into a money maker (parked page or something else) it’ll probably lose some rank and drop in search results.

Researching a registered or typo domain isn’t too hard either; if you’re buying from a forum get in contact with the person selling via a PM (personal message). Ask for some screenshots of where all the traffic is coming from (referral stats), aggregate traffic history (monthly traffic totals) and screenshots of revenue from the domain. For everything you request, try and get screenshots for more than 1 month, I try to get at least 3 to 6 months; I think it’s only fair when the seller is usually asking for 10-20 months of revenue for the domain.

You should also go and check the Alexa data, the domains pagerank and the number of backlinks for yourself.

If you’re buying from places like sedo, it’s a bit harder to get that history of traffic and revenue, all you have to rely on is the Alexa data, pagerank and backlink checker.

End of the day it all ready depends on what you’re planning on doing with the domain, take all the factors into consideration before you purchase.

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

1. Establish your budget
2. Search for domains within your budget
   1. Expired domains
   2. Registered domains
   3. Typo domains
3. Researching the domain
4. Purchasing the domain
5. Monetise the domain
   1. Parking
   2. Selling Traffic
   3. Affiliate Programs
6. Fast Start
7. 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:

• DNForum.com
• DomainState.com
• NamePros.com
• DigitalPoint.com
• v7n.com
• Webmaster-Talk.com

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:

• Afternic.com
• Sedo.com
• BuyDomains.com
• DotComAgency.com
• TDNAM.com
• SnapNames.com
• Pool.com
• NameDrive.com
• Moniker.com
• ImpressiveDomains.com

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.

Making money from domains is more commonly known as domaining, it’s the art of buying and selling domains. You can buy a new domain from a registrar if you think it’s able to generate its own type in traffic, this is pretty hard to do now days since most of the good names out there are all snatched up by other people, so your only other options are to buy an existing domain from someone else or from a domain aftermarket.

I’m going to give you some ideas and insights into how you can make money online and profit from the domain name game and I’m going to try and list out as many good resources an tools for you as I can find and let you know what I use when I do my domianing.

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

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

Establish your budget

With any venture into making money, you will need to spend money. You can argue this point with me by saying you can do the work yourself for free, but doing the work yourself isn’t free, your time is worth money, if you were to spend the time working for someone else, you’d be charging for that time, so to start off you need to set your own personal time budget.

This is pretty easy, budget what you can afford, if you need to work 40hrs a week and your only free time is around 5 hours a week, then budget that amount of time, don’t budget 20hrs to domaining if you can’t afford it. Don’t quit your day job yet.

Why do you need a time budget? Because, searching and researching domains that you’re going to invest in can take tens of hours per domain.

You’re also going to need to set yourself a cash budget, how much can you afford to invest in this money making opportunity – without forgetting that you could just be throwing money away at a potential loss.

Be realistic with what you can afford, if it’s your first time I would suggest keeping your budget under $500, investing $300 to $500 should be able to get you a good domain or two to get you started, give you a feel of the whole domianing game.

Domain kiting / domain tasting has got me thinking recently after a friend of mine who’s in the design arena lost a clients domain, the registrar dropped it and a different one picked it up instantly.

The registrar that picked it up was eNom. eNom is one of the biggest registrars in the world, 2^nd only to Go Daddy who I think we all know pretty well.

The registrar who had the domain in the first place sent out notices, there’s like a 45 day period after the domain expired for my friend to buy it again, but the emails were going to the wrong email address, someone else originally registered it and my friend was just looking after the site overall, so my friend never really got these emails and since it dropped the client is not very happy.

After the registrar dropped the domain eNom picked it up and is now basically kiting it. How did eNom catch this domain so quick? eNom has the largest domain aftermarket drop-catching tool, called Club Drop, for eNom it’s all about catching dropped names and trying to sell them again at a profit, to sell them they have a service called Afternic where they list their domains for sale, straight away the bidding on the domain starts at like $200. (Price varies for different domains). Now I’m not 100% if they own Afternic or not, but it’s fully integrated into their site, and eNom are fully integrated into theirs.

For my friend to make an offer on the domain (owned by eNom) he has to use a service called Afternic. Afternic which is an eNom company charges like $55 to ‘track down, contact and negotiate with the owner’. So for my friend to even try to get this domain back, has to pay this $55 fee, so he did, and he made the $200 offer to them, Afternic came back and said the owner wants $600, all this is starting to get expensive so he’s decided not to bother anymore and eNom have made $55 from him + more from anyone else who wants to buy the domain.

And now since he’s made that offer, there’s a notice on the Afternic page for the domain that says “Due to a prior offer on this domain, you must offer more than $200″

To me this is all a scam, buy dropped domains, charge people for an automated service that allows you to make an offer on the domain, up the amount they want for it, since your already invested in buying it your most likely to pay the higher amount anyway…

Anyway, while that domain is sitting there waiting for offers it’s being hosted on their servers with a template full of keyword driven ads, so in the meantime, until someone buys it, they’re making money from it.

Now here’s where it gets super profitable. Welcome to domain kiting / domain tasting. Registrars are using a five-day “grace period” to keep domains for free, for as long as they want. When a registrar registers a domain with ICANN (company that regulates domains) ICANN offer them this 5 day grace period to either, pay and keep the domain or not pay and loose the domain, so what they do is, keep it for 5 days, drop it so they don’t have to pay, then pick it back up again 2 seconds later for 5 more days. Again and again and again.

eNom never actually paid for the domain that dropped. It’s theirs for free basically. They get to make money from the ads on it; they get to sell it at auction all for profit, and they are charging heaps for the chance to make an offer on it without spending a cent on the actual domain.

What the…? It’s a loophole in the ICANN policies on domain registration

It’s a simple hole to fix but no one’s complaining loud enough to fix it.

Biggest problem I have with domain kiting is that the majority of domains you want to buy now days aren’t paid for, they’re just kited, squatted on until people pay a premium for them.

For example, this is an old article but interesting none the less, Bob Parsons, CEO of Go Daddy wrote about domain kiting a while ago, mostly he was targeting DirectNIC.

You might find the registration statistics of DirectNIC somewhat interesting. DirectNIC registered more than 8.4 million domain names in April 2006, but only permanently registered — or paid for — 51.4 thousand of those. The trend was the same in March, when DirectNIC registered 7.6 million names and only permanently registered — or paid for — 52.5 thousand. Whatever could DirectNIC be doing? Why are they dropping and re-registering all those names – again – and again – and again? And why doesn’t ICANN care?

You can see the full article about domain kiting / domain tasting on Bob Parsons blog, it’s interesting and all about domain kiting.

eNom actually have a useful tool out there called RegistrarSTATS, the tool also has a domain name generator based on keywords, which is also pretty useful.

… Continued in part 2 – What you can do and how you can profit this Sunday.

In part 2 we will show you:

• Where to buy and sell domains
• What to look for when buying a domain
• How to profit from domains names
• Different strategies and methods
• And more!