Domain Name Arbitrage

Here are steps you can take to make money off of buying and selling a domain name.

Essentially, what you are doing is speculating on the future events. You're hoping to find a domain name for a current event, or an upcoming movie, or a rock group, that you think will be worth more to someone else then its current registration price.

What I mean is simply a domain like www.als;kfjsdl;afjlsd;jakl;.com, while available, may not be sought after by many people (if at all), while www.nike.com would be worth thousands if not millions to not only the clothing giant, but to anyone advertising/selling/promoting or even competing with Nike's products.

You then want to find a domain that you think will be of value to someone, register it, hold it for as long as necessary, and then sell it!

Below I will share the experience I gained when registering my very first 4 domains.
Follow the same steps and you can do the same:

1. Select Your Domain Name:
   Best tool I found to date is the http://instantdomainsearch.com, the availability for .com, .net and .org is displayed immediately.
   
   
2. Register the Domain Name:
   Finally when you find the domain name that you think will be of value to someone in the future, register it! The process is simple, so don't delay. Domain names sell for about $10/year at market places like GoDaddy.com. InstantDomainSearch however offers a coupon, of $2.50 when you click on the GoDaddy link directly below their domain name search bar.
   
   Now register the domain name, by setting up an account with GoDaddy. There are many extra features that these guys will try to sell to you, so be wise with what you check off.
   For example the Certified Domain Seal is offered for an additional $2.99. For my purposes of selling and reselling a website, it was useless.
   (Certified Domain Seal: In a nutshell it verifies that the contact information submitted during the registration is valid. Hence you will find an additional email in your inbox prompting you to follow a link to verify your email address, and an automated phone call to a phone you chose, giving you a number that you then must enter online to verify your phone. Congratulations, now your site will have GoDaddy's seal ensuring that you're the legitimate owner, and of course a link to GoDaddy, thus paying to advertise for them! From an ecommerce perspective though, any seal at the checkout section increases conversions. I did discover an additional benefit to the seal when I was listing my pages on sedo; those domain names with a seal were available to be lited on the auction page almost immediately, but the domain names without a seal were delayed 24 hours. My conclusion: is still that they are not worth it.)
   
   
3. Web-Hosting Options:
   The company with which you registered your domain name will probably offer to do your hosting. Strictly for reselling your domain, you don't need hosting at all. When however I registered d-9movie.com, GoDaddy just parked its ads there. And while I was happy to not pay GoDaddy for hosting, I did not want to advertise for them for free! I registered with sites.google.com and within a few minutes designed a simple page (http://sites.google.com/site/dist9mov) with two lines; offering an email with an automatic 'mailto:' html tag; letting visitors know that the domain name was for sale, and prompting them to email me offers.
   
   
4. URL Forwarding & URL Masking:
   So if you want visitors to see something of yours, while you do not pay a cent to place your content, they need to be forwarded.
   
   Because as you probably deduced, those sites offering free hosting also give you a free domain name. So while you just registered www.WantedDomain.com, anyone going there will see nothing of yours; you need visitors to go to your FREE site that is: www.WantedDomainIsForSale.blogger.com or http://sites.google.com/site/WantedDomainIsForSale for example.
   
   GoDaddy made forwarding and masking very easy, so I kept using it. Under Domain Related on the left hand side menu, select Domain Forwarding. Under forwarding enter the URL of the content you'd like visitors to see when they go to the domain name you just purchased. Select 301 or 302 notice to inform the search engines if the domain has moved temporarily or permanently (probably will affect the search result's listed URL). Under masking enter the same URL, and now instead of the name of the free host, you will have the domain name you purchased displayed for the visitors.
   
   Beyond that, you'll read: 'Note: When you enable forwarding and masking, you must manually update your nameservers to the Parked/Forwarded Nameservers before forwarding can take effect. To update your nameservers, click the Nameservers button in the action bar above after you have completed the forwarding and masking task.'
   I have NEVER done this, and STILL had my domain names both forwarded and masked within minutes. That's why it's an easy process.
   
   <<<>> http://www.namepros.com/
   
5. Tracking:
   I was interested to find out how many visitors I had to my site, so while I could have added a free counter (one of the gadgets offered by sites.google) I could have opted out for: <<<>>> but instead I registered also with http://www.google.com/support/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=97459
   
   
6. Selling <<>> <<>>
   However, in most cases, you can’t transfer the domain away from the registrar unless you wait 60 days after registration. If you are within that 60-day period, you can still perform what is called a “push.” However, in most cases, you can’t transfer the domain away from the registrar unless you wait 60 days after registration. If you are within that 60-day period, you can still perform what is called a “push.”
   On the flip side, if you don’t know the person you are transacting with, you run the risk of being scammed. If you sold a domain and the person who bought it decided to do a chargeback, that money could be zapped right out of your account. There have been many cases where domainers have sold domains, only to have the “buyers” process a chargeback on the credit cards attached to their Paypal.com accounts.
   transacting large amounts of money for domains via Paypal.com is probably not the best avenue. In place of Paypal.com, for domain transactions, I whole-heartedly recommend escrow services like Sedo.com, Escrow.com and Afternic.com. For Paypal.com-like transactions, less the charge-back risk, Moneybookers.com is another respectable alternative
   

   Sedo.com – Sedo specializes in international-domain names and domains with foreign traffic. Sedo.com also has its own auction house -- the world’s largest.

   NameDrive.com – NameDrive also specializes in international domain names and names with foreign traffic, but it offers many different types of landers, while also incorporating different languages. NameDrive.com offers a “park and sell” option, and is widely known for its excellent customer service. They also have a blog that they update often, blog.namedrive.com.

   Fabulous.com – Fabulous.com has the best poker/casino/gambling PPC payouts, hands down. Accounts at Fabulous are a bit more difficult to get, but they are an absolute necessity to have, if you own poker-, casino-, gambling-type domains. Fabulous.com also does well with strong generic names.

   Parked.com – Parked.com is known for paying its clients twice per month—the only one in the industry that pays out two times in a month. A client gets paid every 15 days, allowing the client to reinvest quickly. Parked.com also offers a wide array of parking graphics, so you can tweak the parking pages to your level of choice.

   Whypark.com - Great when it comes to building content rather than just ads <><><><

   
   If you are looking for a parking company and need a quick review, I would suggest you check ParkQuick’s list first.
   Beyond domainnews.com, there are also a number of other places that offer some great insight regarding domains.

   Here are a few:

   www.namepros.com - An open, community-based domaining talk group that talks about buying and selling domains, and anything else domain-related.

   www.dnforum.com – The world’s largest domain forum. A paid membership is required, but is well worth the price.

   www.whizzbangsblog.com – Michael Gilmour, a great friend of mine, updates his blog very regularly. He is involved in PPC optimization and works hard to promote parking transparency. Micheal posts his blog entries here on DomainNews on a daily basis.

   www.elliotsblog.com – Another good friend of mine, Elliot, writes about the development of his domain project, his Lowell.com (a site he’s building from scratch about a town in Massachusetts) and about domains/domaining in general. He is a proponent of the ICA --www.internetcommerce.org -- and he also lists some of his own domains for sale on his blog.

   www.conceptualist.com – Sahar Sarid is one of the world’s biggest domainers. Sahar writes about the state of the domain industry, along with a lot of insight about the domaining industry’s biggest and newest trends. His blog entries are posted here on DomainNews on a daily basis.

   www.dnflipping.com – Morgan Linton is a professional I came to know through networking. I have read Linton’s book and am quite impressed. Even when speaking about my own book, I plug Linton’s book about flipping domains as another great source of knowledge.

   http://www.domaingraduate.com/secure/go.php?r=17&i=l0 – This book is my own work, which I put together over the course of a year of domaining. It is tailored exclusively to the new domainer and illustrates some of the most “need-to-know” information on domain investment for beginners.