So you just woke up and realized that a whole new world has been discovered and you have been left behind. Yes we are talking about the internet and though it has been around for I guess it seems like ever, most people think that it it just some cool place to hang out on a MySpace, Face Book, or Bebo page.

Well I guess that is true but truer still is that the web is the future. Ten years from now most people will be sitting stunned wondering what happened and just how they were so blind as to miss the greatest opportunity in the history of opportunities.

Think about the house you live in. Well in internet terms your house is a web site. But there are other houses on your street and other streets in you town. What makes your house findable is your address. Well a web site just like your house needs an address. On the internet an address is a domain name.

Think about your town again. There are some great places where the rich folk live and medium places where most people live and then there are some not so great places where the less well off live.

Just like real estate with Domain Names the old adage location, location, location holds.

.com is where the best folk live, .net and .org is for the middle class, .info and the likes is for the poor and .cc and .ws etc is for the poor.

Also like real estate there are some great places where the super rich live, so with the .com’s there are the super names. Things like pets.com and Pizza.com. Even within the realms of multiple word .com’s there are jewels like creditcards.com etc.

The first thing you need to know is that your chances of acquiring a top class .com are equivalent to finding a suitcase with a million dollars. Your chances of acquiring a second tier .com are just as low.

So what to do for someone like you who has just woke up and saw the boat leaving for the Promised Land without you.

If you go to a registrar like www.GoDaddy.com and start searching for names that you like you will soon find that anything with two meaningful English words is long gone. So where do you find names when investors, squatters, hoarders, own everything that is any good and have it parked (explanation to follow).

The answer is expired or dropped names. Each day thousands of domain names are dropped by their current owners for various reasons. Most are useless, some by accident, some for purely investing purposes (you can only support so many names in a portfolio and come renewal time you must decide what to keep and what to let go.)

Realize that competition for expiring names is fierce and that you might have to bid against an investor who has a lot more money than you. Recently I bid for the name “craft kitchens dot com” but at a selling price over $500 it proved to rich for me. However I managed to acquire http://www.PremierCashAdvance.com/ for $10. As you can see craft kitchens is a superior name and the bidding reflected this.

The domain name on this site http://www.expirex.com/ was bought on www.GoDaddy.com aftermarket for $5.

So where arw the auctions? www.GoDaddy.com is probably the largest domain name registrar and so it holds that most dropped names are with www.GoDaddy.com . For a minimal monthly fee, less that $4 you can peruse and buy the names that are expiring with www.GoDaddy.com .

Also you can buy or bid on names at places like Sedo.com, afternic.com and fabulous.com.

Sometimes though not very often you might find something worthwhile on Ebay.

 

An absolutely great resource for finding expiring names is http://www.freshdrop.net/.

Things to keep in mind when buying domains:

  • Keywords are king, they are the location, location, location of a TLD
  • Age, an older domain will most probably be well traveled on the search engines.
  • Back links, other sites linked to the name
  • Archives, pages linked to the name that have been archived by the way back machine. http://www.archive.org

 

Other resources to help with your search are:

 

Happy Hunting