By Jonathan Street

This truly is the business to get into. It’s a red hot opportunity that savvy investors can make a killing on when you know how. And this article will walk you step-by-step through the money-making process.

Don’t be put off by the term “investors.” I’m not talking big money here. As long as you’ve got a spare $10 or so a week, then great money can be made for only half an hour of your time. Like the sound of that? Thought so.

There’s a few ways you can make money buying domain names and selling them for profit. And I mean PROFIT. You’ll see why people will be scratching at your door to buy off you in just a moment.

Let’s start with the basics.

All domain names are registered for only a limited amount of time. Registrars can choose to use the name for a period of between 1-10 years. After this, rights to these domain names expire and the user has to renew the name again. If they don’t do this, the domain be placed on hold for a short time and then deleted. This means it will then be available for anyone who wants to buy it!

This is where you can cash in!

20,000 expired domain names are made available each and every day. Some of them are very attractive and well-established names.

EXAMPLE: Last year the owners of Race.com carelessly didn’t renew their registration. It was grabbed (the term used to describe purchasing an expired name) by a savvy ‘investor’ for a few pounds and sold for thousands and thousands back to the old owner.

The owner was willing to pay huge sums to the investor because he had built up qualified traffic over X amount of years and didn’t want to lose all previous customers.

Now I admit that making a sale for thousands is rare, but it is certainly possible.

It is more likely that you can buy a domain name and register it for $10-$50 and then sell it for anything from $150 - $1.000. Do this with five domain names a week, and you’re looking at a big sum of money for only a couple hours work.

It’s not just businesses that have carelessly let their domain names lapse that will buy off of you. Other businesses too may want to buy the names to get the old owners’ traffic. It’s a legitimate way to increase your customer base.

And if the old owner and a new potential owner get into a bidding war… well, the sky really is the limit.

So there are two main reasons why people will be willing to pay YOU a couple of hundred or more for a domain name.

• They carelessly let the domain name expire. That means that they will pay you to get the name back to ensure that they don’t lose their existing traffic that they may have built up over years and years.
   
• They are a business in the same field as the one that has let the name expire and therefore will pay you to secure the existing customers of a rival.

Here step-by-step is how you go about this fantastically profitable part time business.

There are several sources of expired domain name information and research tools, some free and some that require a payment of a fee.

Namestead supplies lists of names due to be deleted. DeletedDomains allows you to do some searching free and more extensive searching for a $99 annual fee. You can search for names that are due to be deleted, and it also allows you to bid on newly deleted names that have already been grabbed by other ‘investors.’

What you are looking for is an expired domain name with traffic in the last month of anything over 1,500. Ensure that the site is an actual consumer site. There’s no point buying a domain name if the previous site wasn’t selling any goods.

If you see a site that had tens of thousands of visitors in the last month, GET IT. The likelihood is that the previous owners will be itching to get their name back due to its obvious success.

Also, use an automated grabbing system such as SnapNames and Pool.com. These will help you register domains names the second they become available. The cost is about $60 per domain, but only if they get the names for you. Definitely worth it in my eyes.

Remember, you could easily sell a name for hundreds, maybe thousands.

In part 2, we’ll take a look at how you go about selling the names once you have acquired them. In the meantime, here are a few domain names that were up for sale when this article was written and their asking prices. Obviously not all names sell for this much, but it’s a very real possibility that you could stumble across a gem in your business.

• my.com $750,000
• lovelife.com $350,000
• fights.net $16,000
• diet.us $35,000
• askdoctors.com $7,500
• dietary.info $6,000
• lovemaking.info $10,000
• textmeassage.net $17,000
• ejobmarket.com $1,800
• smokers.tv $5,000
• teens.org $22,000
• raregifts.com $20,000

The profits in this business are like no other. Now it’s your turn to get your hands on your share of this billion dollar industry, buying and selling domain names.

Jonathan Street is a master at making vast sums of money for very little investment. Direct mail, mail order, selling domain names, eBay… you name it, he’s making money from it. He’s also the author of “How To Make £5,000 - £10,000 a Month From Home,” a book which he invites you to get for free from his website.

SOURCE: TeachMarket.com – The Extra-Bucks-For-Teachers Resource

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