Over the coming week, I’ve written a series of posts that are designed to introduce you to the world of domaining. Because I’ve devoted a little time to discussing it on this website over the past month, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from my contact form asking for various tips, ideas, and even suggestions regarding domaining and existing domaining portfolios. These questions are welcome, but I figured it would be beneficial to write up a major overview and hopefully answer a lot of these questions in posts. If you have domaining questions, please hold off until after the series is over before sending them, as many will hopefully be answered throughout the posts scheduled throughout the rest of the week. After this week is done, feel free to then send your questions if I didn’t provide an answer. Good? Lets get started!

What is domaining?

If you are interested in domaining for a living, or more likely, as a serious hobby, the first thing you need to do is change how you view domains. There is only one of every domain out there, meaning that once it is gone, you are at the mercy of the person that now owns it. They may not want to sell it, or they may only sell it for $10,000.00+. Either way, you no longer have the power to own your own brand in many cases (unless you are entitled to it via trademark). This is the mentality that many domainers have when buying/selling domains and helps generate income. You will also need to learn to look at a domain as more than just a home for a website. Domainers also generate income with cash parking or flipping them for profit.

In future posts we’ll talk more about how to find a domain, but once you have them, what do you do with them?

The first thing you can do is attempt to monetize them by purchasing domains that receive a lot of natural traffic from web browsers. Natural traffic means that people type the URL into their web browser to visit the website directly, rather than relying on search engines to find them. If you have a lot of domains that receive traffic this way, you can make money by placing ads on these domains that are relevant to what the person may be looking for. This is commonly referred to as cash parking. Most domain registrars, including GoDaddy, offer this service to anyone for an annual fee. Parked.com has another alternative. You will then keep a large portion of the ad revenue. How much you keep depends upon which registrar you have your domains with. Some domainers that do a lot of cash parking will specialize in buying misspelled domains. Some examples of misspelled domain names include gogle.com, google.cm, google.co, yaho.com, etc.

The second method is called domain flipping. If you are familiar with property flippers, then you probably have the general idea of what a domain flipper is/does. Someone who flips properties will buy a number of houses at a discount rate (usually at a Foreclosure or estate sale) and then fix them up and resell them for a huge profit. A domain flipper used to be a person that registered domain names that would later have value and then sold them at a hiked up price. In today’s world, pretty much all domains are already registered, so a domain flipper is now someone who purchases domains from people that don’t know their true value and then either lets them mature over months/years and sells them, or turns around and sells them at a much higher price. Domain flippers also scour the dropped/expiring domain lists and back order valuable domains, or some will even go as far as to purchase them from companies going through bankruptcy.

Now that you have the basic idea of what domaining is and how it works, tomorrow we’ll move on to putting it in to practice. In the meantime, I recommend you check out this post about the State of the Domaining Industry. You may also enjoy this recent news video talking about how significant the world of domaining has gotten:

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