Most people with even a little bit of experience on the web know that a nice profit can be made with a good domain name. There are numerous stories where a lucky individual got in at the right time and bought a good generic domain name (for around $100 in the early 1990′s) and sold it later for millions. One example of this is a 43 year old man from Maryland that sold Pizza.com for $2.6 million.
For the most part, the really good domains have already been taken. Or have they? Two years ago I bought a very nice keyword niche domain for a measly $250. I turned the domain into a blog, worked on it for about 2 1/2 years and sold it for $10,000. Not a bad profit for blogging about something I enjoyed. I’m still shocked that I only had to shell out $250 for this nice domain. Did I get lucky or was the timing just right? Maybe it was a little bit of both.
If you can find a keyword rich domain name, you too can work on it, flip it and possibly make a nice pile of cash. When looking for a domain focus on generic words and avoid names with trademarks (i.e. pizza.com instead of pizzahut.com). There’s a 99.9% chance that all the good names aren’t available, so… where can you find a good one? You buy them from people or companies that are in the business of selling domain names an individual that has lost interest in a name.
Where to Buy Premium Domain Names – Here’s a list of places where you can buy premium domain names. I’ll try to add to this list every now and then to make it as complete as possible. If you have any other recommendations, please leave a comment below.
GoDaddy Domain Name Aftermarket – Tons of domain names available in fixed price or auction format. Sort by time ending, price and filter out garbage so you can only see the good .com domains. If you keep an eye on TDNAM you may find a good deal every now and then. Try to check once a week.
Sedo – Excellent domains available at fixed price or auction.
DNForum – Buy and sell domain names in the Domain Name Forum. You can also get a domain appraisal to get an idea of how much your site is worth.
NamePros – Another forum for you to buy and sell domains.
Great Domains – Not positive, but they may list the same domains as found on Sedo.
Buy Domains – Buy and sell domains, search by keyword, etc.
There are many more domain brokers out there so you might also try searching phrases such as “premium domain names”, “domain broker”, etc.
Once you find a good domain name, you can try a few things to make a profit. You can sit on it for awhile (called squatting), slap up a simple page with your contact info and hope someone contacts you to buy it at some point. You could list it with one of the sites mentioned above and bring it more exposure to increase your odds of selling it. Sometimes they charge a fee or take a commission from the sale price.
The best thing you can do is develop the site for awhile until it brings in targeted traffic. This is a good way to go as your site will be more desirable if it looks like it could generate revenue for the buyer. An easy way to go is to put up a WordPress blog and blog on the site for a year or two. If traffic is good, find companies selling products/services related to that market and see if they might want to buy your blog. You could also create a web based tool or create a forum. The key is building the site up to a point where it brings in traffic that likely can be converted into sales.
A quick example to might go something like this. You have an interest in crocheting and you find that the domain name CrochetPatterns.com is available. You could make a blog and put a new crochet pattern up every day. Start a forum where people could share crochet patterns. Or, start a site with thousands of crochet patterns could be set up and they patterns could be sold individually… or charge a monthly or yearly fee to access everything.
Once you have a site built with steady, targeted traffic and money coming in, you will be in a great position to sell. If it’s doing good enough, you might be happy to keep it until you get an offer you can’t refuse. 