How to Make Money Flipping Domain Names – Part 2

You asked for it and I’m going to give it to you, this is part 2 of how to make money flipping domain names.  I originally wrote a post on flipping domain names and that was going to be the end of it but I got a few emails of people asking for some more information.  Instead of writing back to each email I decided I’d do a part 2 and give everyone the scoop of what I do to flip domain names.  First off, read part 1 because I’m not going to rehash what I already wrote.  In part 1 I talked about how I go about buying domain names to flip.  Picking the right domain names to flip is acquired through knowledge that you gain and experience.  But you can also do a little legwork to minimize your errors and maximize picking winners that you can flip.  This also leads into how I find people to sell the domain names to.

You have a domain name that you are either considering buying or placing a bid on, or you already bought the domain.  You want to scout prospective buyers of this domain.  What do you do?  There are two approaches that everyone should take which are major, and then a whole bunch of minor ones that may work out once in a while.  Let’s talk about these two major approaches.  The first approach is to get to Google and type in your domain keyword.  Meaning, if the domain I bought was BlueCars.com than I’d go to Google and search for the phrase – blue cars.  See who the natural search engine results are.  See who is paying to advertise for this keyword.  You can either grab all those website URLs and check the Whois data to get the email address of the owner, or you can visit those sites and see if they have contact information.  This first method provides you with some great potential leads.  These are people who are either spending bucks to advertise for this term or people who have focused their SEO efforts on this term.

The second major method is to find out who owns all the other domain extensions for this term… meaning if I bought BlueCars.com than who owns the .net, and .org, and .eu, .es, .info, .tv, .mobi, etc…  Because the .com domain is king, and if given the chance, most smart people would upgrade from a .net to the .com.  By finding out who owns all these domains you’re getting another list of potential buyers.  You should also consider who owns the hyphenated versions as well, i.e.  blue-cars.com, blue-cars.net, etc…  You can do this manually.  You can use a site like LeadRefs.com to help you with this (they allow a few free searches per day and then they want you to subscribe).  Or if there’s any other good sites that do this out there you can use them too if you want skippy.

Those are the two major approaches I’d recommend to you when looking to flip a domain name.  There are multiple minor ones which sometimes work to a lesser success rate.  I’m not going to blab on about all these, the only one I will mention is take a look if any related domains sold recently.  The historical domain sales site I like to use is DNSalePrice.com and in this example I’d type bluecar.com in there and see if any related sales are shown (it may show you something like fastbluecar.com or mybluecar.com or bluecars.com , etc….).  If someone bought a related domain name that they may be interested in your domain.  Get the whois of the domain they bought and reach out to them to see if they are interested in purchasing your domain name.

I have already read your minds and I know I’m going to get emails asking about how to determine what to ask for your domain when you are selling it.  I will write a part 3 about the negotiation process and who should make the first offer, how to determine what price to try to get, and how to know when you should take the money and run.