Many of you might know that you can buy and sell websites to make money. But did you know you can just sell the domain names as well? Buying and selling domains is a lucrative business. It doesn’t require much effort on your part, unlike website flipping. You just have to be quick-minded about things. You can either buy a domain from someone willing to sell one, or you could come up with your own domain name. You can then either sell them, or park them for future. Either way, it is a business much like real estate, which involves much the same concepts. In this post, we’ll talk some tips that’ll help you make more money through buying domains and selling them for a profit.
We have already talked in yesterday’s post about tips for how you should buy a domain. In that post, we talked about how a domain name’s worth is calculated. Some domain names go for millions of dollars while others go for just a few bucks. You could buy a name for a few bucks, and sell it for hundreds, or you could come up with your own domain name, and park it. Parking means holding a domain name. Learn more about domain parking;
Buying Domains
1. Background checks – Before willing to buy a domain, you must make all the necessary background checks. Check with DomainTools and WayBack’s Archives to see what sort of content a website had previously. Stay away from domains that hosted hate, violence, or adult content,because there’s a fair chance that domain has fallen from grace in many eyes.
2. Domain name worth – Words that you normally find in a dictionary are usually expensive domain names. That is because they have a high type-in traffic volume. The more the words in the domain name, the less expensive it is. Same goes for more than 5 letters in a one-word domain name. Don’t let anyone make you overpay.
3. Type-in names – Type-ins are words that people enter directly into a browser, for example sports.com, college.com, kitchenrecipes.com, and so on. These have the most worth. But sometimes, people create and park names that people commonly type in by mistake, such as gooogle.com. Stay away from these kinds of domains. People hate it when they land on a site they didn’t intend to visit.
4. Content and traffic – Check out what sort of traffic a domain has. Domains that once hosted some business might have many backlinks. But these backlinks will decrease as people will realize that the business no longer exists. Hence, the name will devalue over time. On the other hand, if it’s a popular type-in, it might be worth taking. There are websites that have nothing in them, yet they have thousands of backlinks because the domain name is a common type-in. A good example of this is something.com. It has literally just one word written in it, ‘something’. Yet recently, it came on top of Google results for ‘something’.
5. Check out similar domain names – While buying a domain name, it’d be a good idea to look at domains that have similar keywords, or same keywords but different extension. See what sort of traffic they’re getting, and how much they’re worth.
6. Popular trends – Check out latest information and trends to see what’s hot. Some domains have a rising and falling market viability. They might not be popular when you buy them, but may go for a lot while selling. Investments aren’t always safe, but those who don’t take risks don’t succeed.
7. Consider other extensions – It is a good idea to invest in other domains. The .co and .tv extensions are becoming more and more popular.
8. Beware of copyrights – Don’t buy domain names that might have copyrighted keywords in them, for example WordPressTutorials.com. They might sue you and force you to give up control of the domain, because they have already registered patents, in which case, you are violating the copyright law.
9. Popular categories – Look at Google traffic and SEO rankings, and see what’s trending, and what are the popular categories. Sports, gaming, fitness are among some of the very popular categories.
Selling Domains
10. Tell them how to contact you – The hardest part for buyers is to contact a domain owner. Many need to check WhoIs information to contact an owner, and half of the times, they still can’t be found. Usually, buyers don’t have this kind of patience, so they might walk away. It is important that you make it easier for them to find you by creating a ‘Contact Us’ page, where they can see all your contact information, from phone number to email address.
11. Provide accurate information – Accurate information is also very important. Contact information changes. Phone numbers change. Even email addresses change sometimes. Be sure to keep your WhoIs information updated.
12. Communicate effectively – Always be quick to reply to emails. This lets them know you are active, and not someone who parked a domain and forgot it there. Otherwise, they’ll just move on to other sellers.
13. Set an asking price – To make a sale, you’ll need to ask for a price.And if you mention your price on your parking or Contact Us page, you’ll make a sale much quicker. When small companies or individuals don’t see an asking price, they sometimes might not bother, because they might think you aren’t going to negotiate. Putting up a ballpark price will let interested parties know immediately whether it’s within their budget or not. They will then readily contact you for negotiations.
14. Contact other parties – Companies aren’t usually named after the availability of a corresponding domain name. For example, if a company decides to name themselves ‘Smart Earning Methods'(little chances of that happening, but still :P), they’ll find that SmartEarningMethods.com isn’t available. They might come up with something like smartearning.com (if it’s not already taken). So what we can do is, we can visit sites that have similar domain names to ours, and ask them if they’re interested in buying (not that we’re interested in selling :P). Similarly, we could visit smartearningmethods.org and ask them the same. They might like a .com domain.
15. Promote! – Social media is widely popular these days. With almost everyone using it for some purpose or another, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t spread the word on social media website and forums. A lot of buyers look for domains that way. It’s a tried method and will surely get you some good results and increase your sales.
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