Yes, it is possible to make money from expired domains, however be warned that it is not easy. There are about 100,000 domains expiring every single day, therefore there is no shortage to work from. But it is just like any other business requiring your hard work.
There is no free money on the internet, so you have to work hard for any genuine money making business, if you think otherwise, you will be deceived. 95% of the make money programs and e-books you see daily are a TOTAL & COMPLETE waste of time and money.
Please be advised though that the highest quality expired domains will be snatched beforehand by pros that have higher computer equipment than you will ever have, however there are still gems in the trash and you can still profit if you are smart and work hard.
In this post I have collected the different ways you can look at if you want to follow this course.
Can You Make Money With Domains?
Here are a few numbers:
- Insure.com sold for $16m dollars in 2009
- PrivateJet.com sold for $30.18m USD in 2012
- VacationRentals.com was sold for $35m USD in 2007
- In october 2014, Ebola.com was sold for a whooping price of $200,000 USD by it’s owner.
As you can see, there is no shortage of opportunities.
Be aware that there are risks involved and you will not be able to profit from every single domain name. Rather, it’s about having more winners than losers.
There are two basic strategies
- You can go for a small number of big wins like the above
- You can figure out a strategy to sell many domains for a smaller price
Strategy one is not easy, it is not dissimilar to real estate investing and it involves some speculation, as you never know which names will be the winners.
Strategy two is already done by websites like JustDropped.com, Dan Rubin makes a pretty good income by sending out weekly emails like this:
He specializes on branded domains and they go pretty fast.
Remember, there are millions of expired domain names. New ones are being registered every day…so there is no end to this incredible business opportunity. Even if 5,000 investors started domain name investing tomorrow, you will still have a chance to make money in this business.
What Kind of Domains Are The Best?
In business, BRANDING is everything, the best domain names are GOLD and remember, there’s no email without a domain name! No domain, no internet.
Domains with backlinks, DA, TF/CF are the next category. People by these for building money sites on them or for PBNs.
.com domains usually perform best. Even though there are all these new domain extensions, they are not as popular and the market is not so saturated that it would be a problem to find a domain to register for a keyword. Expired new TLD domains with backlinks are very few.
Your domains shouldn’t be spammed, over-optimized and you may want to avoid Exact Mach Domains (Partial Match Domains are better). Here is the full procedure on finding expired domains with backlinks and wow to spam check domains.
One strategy is focusing on hot keyword domains with acceptable search traffic, somewhere around 10,000 searches a month. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner.
Geographic names related to countries and cities can be sold to web developers looking to start new communities or businesses. Local SEO has grown to a huge industry. This is a reason why focusing on local names is profitable.
Business names combined with geographic names like real estate New York can be sold conveniently.
Warning: you must make sure you don’t run into copyright and trademark issues like “Coach handbags” or similar. Domain names can cause legal issues, when too similar to already trademarked names.
Expired Domain Investing
Buying domain names as an investment is not new.
You can get started for a few hundred dollars and just snatch up 30-50 deleted domain names. You have one year to turn them into a profit, as that is when your domains will expire. This should be ample time if you work on it regularly. The good thing about deleted domain names is that you can register them for the regular registration price, which will cut down your acquisition costs. You can get a .com domain for $8.99.
These domains still have backlinks, you can check their DA, CF/TF. Unfortunately when you register them their age will be zero, which is a big problem for some potential buyers, but you can still sell these. When you are new, this is the best way to start out.
Your other option is to bid on an expired domain auction. In this case, let’s say you win the auction at $15, but you still need to pay another $12 or so for the next yearly registration. By the way, the year starts from when the domain originally expired, therefore you will be cut short by a few months because of the expiration process.
Another disadvantage is that you will still have to wait several days after the auction until you can finally possess your domain. (In the case of deleted domains you will have them instantly.)
The plus side is that your domain will retain its age, however this doesn’t mean much, per my experience, when you build a new site on it, as you need to start from scratch.
Which Domain Registrars To Use
Obviously, if you buy domains at auctions, you won’t have a choice, it will be the auctioning registrar. This also means that you will need to work with several different domain registrars.
For registering deleted domains, I use NameSilo, as I get the domain for $8.99 with domain privacy included, which means you will not get spammed left right and center. See the details of what happens if you don’t use domain privacy.
Other domain registrars you may want to check out:
- 1&1 – They have 99 cent domain specials.
- GoDaddy – This is a coupon to 99 cent domains
- DynaDot – $9.99 .com domains with, free privacy
- 123Reg – UK domain registrar
Name.com – $9.99 .com domain, $3.99 domain privacy. Renewals cost $12.99.
Make Money Domain Parking
How do you make money off parked domains?
Some expired domains have already existing traffic, as traffic is the most basic thing about domain business. In the final analysis, a domain without traffic is useless. It is that traffic an expired domain has that would be giving you your income.
Since domains without a website get de-indexed, domain parking only works if you have type-in traffic or existing traffic from other sources like existing links.
Domain parking could benefit you by earning money when visitors click on ad links.
While you can use domain parking to earn money, in my opinion, if you already have a domain with high traffic, it would make more sense to throw up an actual website and profit like that. A domain will simply lose its traffic if there is no website connected to it, just by reason of getting de-indexed in the search engines.
Here are some of the main websites where you can park your domain:
Domain parking with Sedo is an easy, free way to potentially earn money and improve the chances of selling your domains.
To get started, you must be sure that the domains you wish to park have first been listed in your Sedo account. Only listed domains that have been cleared through Sedo’s ownership verification process can be used in Sedo’s parking program.
To redirect the traffic your domains receive to Sedo’s parking servers you will need to change the Name Server (DNS) to Sedoparking. It may take up to 72 hours for any changes you make to take effect and for your domains to appear parked.
Sedo’s system is designed to automatically choose settings for your parked domains that should generate positive results. However, Sedo’s Domain Optimizer enables you to edit any domain’s keyword, landing page template, related links/popular searches, and image.
The best domain parking site currently for revenue. They will pay you for visitors. They redirect your traffic to people who purchase traffic so they are a great and reliable solution.
You can set your parked domains for sale and integrate with Escrow.com.
They have been around for a long time and offer domain name parking with pop unders and pop ups to increase parking revenue.
Domain Sponsor’s patented domain parking technology uses sophisticated semantic and behavioral testing algorithms to produce the optimal combination of parked domain page keywords, layout, and design elements.
Analyzing and optimizing keywords in every possible domain category and sub-category since 2002. As a result, they know exactly what keywords will produce maximum monetization. Start using better keywords to earn more domain parking revenue.
When a user lands on a domain parked on their platform, sophisticated technology displays tested and optimized keywords and ads that are directly related to what the user was hoping to find.
More than 30 years of combined industry experience. Dedicated account managers that know what they are doing. System built by domainers to satisfy every domainers’ need. They have partnered with the biggest search engine in the world to bring the largest ad inventory out there to your domains. Furthermore, they have a large base of direct advertisers bidding directly on your Tier-2 domain traffic that won’t get properly monetized elsewhere.
Their automatic optimization system will determine what the best layout, keywords, and even colors for your domain and for what your visitors are looking for. But you also have complete control over your domains. You can change layouts, colors, images and keywords.
Buy-Sell Domain Names Business (Domain Flipping)
You could start a domain name flipping business where you buy and sell domains with a short-term time horizon.
Sign up for a free account and get daily free domains from Hammerhead Domains.
Is domain flipping profitable?
We all heard stories on how some lucky ones made millions out of selling a high profile domain name but in reality, this does not happen too often. Very few domain names out there can be sold in exchange for six figure sums, so your chances of becoming a millionaire overnight are slim.
If you have learned the ropes and put enough time in it, you can make several thousand dollars per month and replace your regular income.
Selling domain names for a living does have risks, as I mentioned it before. It’s a numbers game.
Just like any other field of business, you need experience to become a successful domain flipper.
You will make several mistakes like buying useless domain names, missing deals. The road to flipping domains is not easy; there is a steep learning curve before you can become a pro.
Selecting a profitable domain niche is very important. A specific niche will enable you to seek out prospective buyers actively who would be interested in the domain names you are selling.
How To Sell Domain Names For Profit
- Selling domain names takes time. You can count on it that it will take a few months to sell many of your domains.
- Domain name selling is not a passive process. In other words, you will need to actively promote your domains in order to get sales. You need to actively seek out prospective buyers.
- You can sell your domains as an auction or you can set a fixed price and give it to the first person that pays.
To become a successful domain flipper, you need marketing expertise as well as research, negotiation and networking skills.
Something you need to understand – just because someone spent an fortune on a domain name does not mean someone will buy a similar name too. Never base your domain flipping strategy on such assumptions because that rarely ever happens.
Each domain name gets the interest of the buyer due to a unique reason. The sale is just as unique.
Here is a resource on how you can sell domain names.
Building Niche Affiliate Sites For Sale
This is another way you can profit from expired domains. Instead of just selling a domain, you can install WordPress, put up some content and let the site sit for a few months.
While this is more work, the advantage is that the new owner will need to wait less in order to be able to get search traffic and therefore you can sell it for more. Dom Wells at HPD has a business that sells aged niche sites.
There are certain subjects that can be profitable, because they attract traffic – like best sites to download Bolliwood movies.
Selling Expired Domain Traffic
In my opinion this has more noise about it than usefulness, just because the pros already snatch profitable traffic domains well beforehand.
If you have a domain with considerable traffic, you would be much better off to utilize it for building a website and monetize it with affiliate marketing.
Opening Your Own Domain Registration Business
Yes, you could even add a domain registration business to your own site.
Some registrars like NameSilo have options to register their domains under your own branding.
Of course this is a lot of work, because you need to handle customer service, etc.
Starting An eCommerce Store
There are a lot of e-commerce-worthy domain names out there and you could start a store. You could use PrestaShop, Shopify or Woocommerce.
This goes well past the subject of domain flipping and it has its own drawbacks, like dealing with customers, refunds, etc.
Building An Amazon Affiliate Site
You can build Amazon affiliate sites based on this video course and either profit from the revenue or by flipping them later.
These can be lucrative, but you could also consider using other affiliate programs to monetize your site.
Become An Expired Domains Affiliate
There are several sites that are already selling different versions of expired domains.
You can become an affiliate of these and refer your site visitors to purchase domains or memberships. You would get a commission for each referred sale.
Sell Your Own Expired Domains
You could set up your own website, like this one, drive traffic to it and sell the expired domain that you have researched and registered.
Sell Expired Domain Crawler/Search Software
Finding expired domains manually is hard work. Therefore software to do this automatically is very popular.
There is software like Domain Ronin, The Ultimate Expired Domain Crawler.
There is also another one called Expired Domain Hunter & Gatherer.
Start A Domain Name Suggestion Site
This is something I was thinking about, but it’s technically challenging to implement.
However you take an expired domain database, update it daily and use it as a domain name suggestion tool.
In my opinion the current suggestion tools are horrible, and this way you can utilize all the work that others have put into coming up with domain name ideas.
The only downside is spam check…
Conclusion
As you can see, there are lots of ways to profit from expired domains. I hope that you can find one that fits you.