There are several ways to make money by buying & selling OR Parking domain names.

#1 Buying and selling already registered domain names for a profit (Investing in Domain names):

The domain name market has been growing extremely fast.  Domain names have on average gained 83% per year for the last few year.  This is on average 5-6 times that of the S & P 500 Index of stocks.  All it takes is a little cash, a good vision of the future and a little luck.  With the right tools, anyone can learn to pick domain names that will be valued at much higher then what they pay when it’s time to sell.  Be careful as the market is still rather sporadic, meaning that prices can range greatly, and you can usually get away with offer someone a much lower price then they are initially asking.

Where to buy and sell already registered domain names:
- http://www.sedo.com - Sedo is one of the most respected domain name marketplace as well as parking area.  There are thousands of searchable domain names listed here for sale, for offer, and for auction.
- http://www.afternic.com – Afternic is probable the second most popular domain name marketplace.  Easy to search for domains and then place an offer to the owners.
- http://www.buydomains.com
- http://www.greatdomains.com
- http://www.impressivedomains.com
- http://www.moniker.com/aftermarket/sell-domain-name.jsp

There are then also a few main domain name forums for buying and selling domain names:
- http://www.Namepros.com
- http://www.Dnforum.com
- http://www.Domainstate.com

Some Domains which often fetch a lot of money:

- If you can still find a good Generic .com domain, you may just hit the jackpot.  A generic .com domain for example would be something like bicycles.com, or snowboards.com.  There are thousands of people a day that instead of using a search engine will just type in the word they are looking for in the browser bar followed by “.com”.  This gives so much value to these generic domains because they are already getting hundreds of thousands of daily targetted visitors.  It would be easy to just slap up a few links with your affiliate url to sites which sell snowboards, bicycles, etc and earn a ton of cash for practically nothing.

- Next there are the short but sweet .com domains.  2-4 letter domains can have huge value to both investors and the eventual end user.  Even if the domains are not actual words they can fetch thousands of dollars.  Examples would be TK.com, HG.com, DA.com, YTH.com etc.  The long term value with these domains persist both because they are short, which means easy to remember, and because there are bound to be people or companies out there who have initials that are the same as these domains.

#2 Buying and Investing in Unregistered, still available, or dropped domain names:

Her are some great links to sites that allow you to search for multiple domain name availabilities:

- http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp – Up to 500 domains at once
- https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/registrar/bulk/bulk.asp – Up to 500 domains at once
- http://rwm.net/virtualis/domain/multiple.htm

Although there are not really too many really great thousand dollar domains names out there since thousands of people have been picking the good ones off over the last 15 years, there are still some names out there that you can make several hundred dollars on my holding and eventually finding the right buyer.

There is a way to find amazing domains names that are no longer registered, having possibly thousands of visits a day, high Google pagerank, and a nice catchy name.  How you may ask?  Well, every day thousands of domains names are not renewed.  Sometimes webmasters just forget to renew some of their better domain names, while other times they just don’t see the value you and I see in the domains they fail to re-register.  The dropped domain market is becoming a whole industry in itself.  In order to be successful in registering dropped domains, you must be extremely quick. remember, once a domain becomes available you must beat out hundreds or thousands of other people looking to register the same ones.  Many registrars will provide a service for backordering names. Backordering may give you an edge on the competition. By paying a fee or bidding on a name, a registrar will try their best to monitor and secure the name as soon as it becomes available. Do a WHOIS search on your selected name and find out what registrar is listed to decide which backorder service to choose.  Make and save a text list of the domain names that you have collected from your searches. Expiring names go through a redemption process to allow the original registrant a chance to renew. This redemption process can take up to a month or sometimes longer. Wait about two weeks from the expiry date and start checking availability each and every day.  To do this it is best to have a bulk domain name search tool such as: http://www.domaintools.com/bulk-check

Where do you find domains that are soon to expire?  Well for one we will try and post them on a weekly basis for members, but you can check all these sites as well on a daily basis:
- http://JustDropped.com
- http://DropScout.com
- http://Pool.com
- http://DropHunt.com
- http://SnapNames.com

My favorite however is this plane old list of dropped domains which updates every day with the newest domains which are actually dropped.  (Note that there are close to 100,000 daily drops so it may take a bit to load them all):  http://www.premiumdrops.com/lists/zone_new.txt

A rule of thumb is that .com domains are far more valuable then any other extensions.  Having said this, .net, and .org domains are the second best, but often can sell for 10% or less then their .com counterparts.

Following Trends:

Another way to find good solid domains names that will be amazing investments for the future is to follow trends.  If a new car comes out, for example called the “Nissan Envelope,” you can register domains names related to that car such as Envelopeforum.com, Envelopetalk.com or EnvelopeBlog.com.  Forum domain names actually can be valued quite high, but remember you need to beet others out in the registration process.  In order to do this, you have to be on top of things, and do what I like to call “Trend Watching”.  You want to pick up on new products, major news events, popular terms, etc as soon as the general public starts buzzing about it.  Here are the tools that will help you do this:

Trends and Finding Hot Topics:
- http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall -  Yahoo’s 20 Most Daily Searches
- http://stats.grok.se/en/top – Top 10,000 Monthly Wikipedia Topics
- http://technorati.com/pop – Technorati Top 15 Daily Searches
- http://100hot.com – List of 100 censored and uncensored top 100 searches every week
- http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends – Google’s 100 Top Searches
- http://50.lycos.com – Lycos Top 50 Searches (updated every few days)
- http://hotsearches.aol.com – AOL’s Top 10 Daily Searches
- http://pulse.ebay.com – Ebay Pulse Top 10 Searches
- http://www.43things.com/zeitgeist/recently_popular_goals – 43Things.com’s 100 Most popular Daily Goals
- http://www.google.com/products – Displays Random recent searched for products
- http://www.psfk.com – Trends and Ideas Blog

#3 Buying Typo’s, as well as domains with type-in traffic, and Parking them.

With it becoming harder to find a domain name you can register and resell within weeks for a profit, many domainers are turning to registering typo domains whenever they notice a new popular website.  For instance when Facebook.com launched, and started receiving millions of visits per day, the domains such as faceboko.com, gacebook.com, faacebook.com, etc quickly began being registered.  Why?  Because out of the millions of people a day who type “facebook.com” into their browser, there were bound to be at least a few hundred or maybe even thousands of people who hit the wrong key.  This traffic is worth money.  If you can register a domain for a year for $8, and it gets 1,000 uniques a day from typos wouldn’t it be worth it?  This is where domain parking comes into play.  Domain parking websites are sites which place targeted ads on the domain when people type it in their browser.  All you do is set your name servers to the ones the domain parking company gives you and they worry about the rest, and then pay you per click.  A site getting 1,000 uniques per day can generate at least $5 per day.  Not bad considering the $8 registration fee will be paid for within 2 days!  Here is a list of some of the domain parking companies out there and what ad feed they use:

- http://www.Sedo.com – Google feed
- http://www.Bodis.com – Ask Feed
- http://www.trafficz.com – Yahoo Feed
- http://www.Parked.com – Yahoo and Google Feeds
- http://www.DomainSponsor.com – Google Feed
- http://Fabulous.com – Google Feed
- http://ParkingPanel.com – Ask Feed
- http://www.TrafficParking.com
- http://www.Afternic.com
- http://www.ActiveAudience.com – Yahoo Feed
- http://www.NameDrive.com – Google Feed
- http://www.google.com/domainpark – Google Feed
- http://www.Streamic.com – Google Feed
- http://www.GoldKey.com
- http://www.ParkQuick.com
- http://Domainspa.com – Yahoo Feed
- http://www.ExoClick.com

Why Do We Need to Know All These Parking Companies?

You may wonder, “What do I need to know all these different parking companies for?  They all use the same feeds, they must all pay the same.”  Well thats not the case.  Certain types of names perform better at different parking companies.  Also remember the different parking companies take a different share of the revenue out, and also are set up differently.  Many parking companies like Sedo, and Namedrive have the actual ads right on the page when someone goes there, while others like Bodis will have targeted keywords that when clicked link to the ads.

Targeting Your Park Domains and Getting the Most out of Them:

The key to making the most money from your parked domains is knowing exactly what people are looking for when going to your domain name.

- If the domain is a typo of a popular website then, goto the correct spelling of that site and figure out what people are looking for.  If the site is a picture gallery for celebrities, then in your control panel, where ever you are parking your domain name, set the keywords to “Celebrities” and “pictures”.  Many of the domain Parking companies also have graphics you can choose.  If this is the case choose the graphics which go best with the domain name.  If dealing with a typo, your goal should be to trick the user into believing he/she is actually at the site they were trying to get to.  This way they will click the ads.

- If the domain is a generic word or set of words, then think about why people would be typing the domain in.  If you own a domain such as “baseballschedules.com” then think about why people would be going there. In this case it is pretty obvious that most of the visitors want to find schedules for major league baseball teams.  Target your parked pages for “mlb schedules” or “major league baseball schedules.”

- If your domain is just getting traffic from back links and search engines from when it used to be an actual website, then, like in the first example, figure out what website people are trying to get to and target your domain accordingly.

Many of the parking sites are now doing auto tagetting based on what people search for in the search box they place at the top of your domain parking page.  We recommend allowing the auto targetting to take place and than evaluating things from there.  You can at least get a better idea of what people are looking for and then add some of your own keywords as well.  http://domainsponsor.com is one of these parking companies which auto target, and so is http://Namedrive.com

A strategy that we recommend is try and sign up for at least 5 or 6 of the parking companies.  Park them all at one for a start, then after 30 days evaluate the results.  Take your bottom 60% of the domains and try them at another company.  Repeat this until you feel you have each domain at the company that pays the best for its traffic.  Use a spreadsheet to track the RPM (Revenue per thousand unique visits) of each domain under each parking company.

Generating Popular Typos of Domains:

Now you may ask, How do I come up with the best typos?  Well you can just think of different ways people will misspell various domain words, or the easier way you can use this handy tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/domain-typo-generator

Her are some common trends in mistyped domain names:
1 – Addition of double letter
2 – Addition of random letter
3 – Deleted double letter
4 – Deleted random letter
5 – Substitution based on the keyboard position (letters that are closer to each other are more likely to be mistyped).
6 – Phonetic substitution – c/k/s, ee vs ea (reed,read) etc
7 – Dyslexic substitution – b/d, etc
8 – ie vs ei substitution
9 – Pushed wrong key  – Instead of and/or in addition to the letter “a” one may hit “s/q/z”.  Or instead of  and or in addition to “r” one may hit “4/5/t/e/f”

For instance we have looked at some stats of typos.  We will use 1,000,000 as the base for the number of times google.com in typed into a browser over a certain period of time. This will show you what sort of typos get the most traffic.  For every 1,000,000 type ins you get the following typos.

Number of times out of 1,000,000 that it is typed  – What the typo is

Missing letters
10,200 – gogle.com
9,800 – googl.com
4,300 – goole.com
1,800 – oogle.com
498 – googe.com

Doubled letters
2,200 – gooogle.com
720 – googgle.com
310 – googlee.com

Reversed letters
6,400 – googel.com
1,600 – goolge.com

Replaced with close letters
515 – googlr.com
290 – gooble.com

Others
200 – googli.com
380 – googler.com

There is also something called “Domain Tasting”.  This basically allows you to register a domain, test out how much traffic it may be getting for 4 days, and then drop it without having to pay the $7-$10 registration fee.  This way you can literally try out thousands of typo and possible traffic domains without having to risk thousands of dollars on registration.  This website:  http://tasting.dotcomgenie.com will allow you to try out domains for only 3 cents per.  If they don’t receive any traffic you just let them drop in 5 days.  If you decide to keep them you just pay the normal registration fee.  Also you can taste domains for free by registering them at http://Dynadot.com and canceling them within 5 days for a refund.

One thing you have to be cautious about is that companies can, and sometimes will issue a Cease and Desist order for trademark infringement, thus taking your typo domain away from you.  It doesn’t happen all that often, however we don’t recommend spending a ton of money for a typo trademark domain.  On the resell market, typos with possible trademark issues sell for about 1-3 times yearly earnings, while typos without trademark issues can sell for between 2-12 times yearly earnings depending on several factors.  If you are going to invest in domains that may have trademark issues, we recommend you diversify your holdings so that if one company decides to issue a Cease and Desist order, it doesn’t bankrupt you.  If you ever do have an issue or question regarding domain name trademarks, here is a list of the top domain attorneys as well as their websites:

John Berryhill – http://www.johnberryhill.com
Brett Fausett – http://www.cckllp.com
Ari Goldberger – http://www.esqwire.com
Zak Muscovitch (In Canada) – http://www.DNattorney.com
Howard Neu – http://www.neulaw.com
Derek Newman – http://www.newmanlaw.com
Neil Smith – http://www.sheppardmullin.com
David Steele – http://www.cph.com
Steve Sturgeon – http://www.domainnamedisputelawyers.com

Also, if you want to search to see if a name is trademarked you can do so at:  http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm

We have found that .fr and .dk have more trademark issues then any other extensions.  Also you can view the hundreds of monthly Trademark disputes at the World Intellectual Property Organizations site:  http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/cases/all.html

For more information about investing in domain name, please read this article:

How To Choose Good Domains For Investing And Getting Profits

These 2 articles Original Posted by Brian, the admin of talkgold.com.

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