Tools and Tips for Catching Expired Domain Names

November 7, 2009

If you’ve ever had an idea for a domain name and tried to register the domain, you probably know that most good domain names are already taken. However, a lot of excellent domain names expire, or drop, every day, whether due to a registrant who forgets to pay the annual fee, a company going out of business, or simply lack of funds to maintain a domain portfolio. And someone else’s loss can be your gain.

In fact, the only way to get decent domain names today is to buy them in the aftermarket, or to snap up domain names that the current registrant has let expire.

In this article we’ll provide you with essential information, and more importantly, the tools for successfully snapping up expired domains.

There are several companies that will snap up expiring domain names for you. If you use one of these companies, the price of the snapped domain usually starts at around $59, and if there are other customers also interested in that domain name, the domain goes into a bidding auction and will be bid up from the starting price.

———- Advertisement ———-

How to Account for Domains Sales Profits on Your Tax Returns?
Wondering what is the best way to declare domain revenues on your income tax? If you count the profits as capital gains, you may only pay 15% tax on those profits. Make sure you don’t pay more taxes than you owe on domain name sales.

Sandra Brooks, author of the Domain Tax Guide specializes in tax planning for domainers. In this invaluable book, Brooks outlines all the details you’ll need for effective tax planning for entrepreneurs who buy and sell domain names.

Learn More About the Domain Name Tax Guide »
———————————–

Three popular expired domain name snapping companies are:

SnapNames
NameJet
Pool.com

You can find lists of expiring domain names at NameJet (see “Resources” section below). The domain lists are offered by expiration date, and you can scan through these lists (often containing 60,000 or more expiring domain names). The problem is that companies like SnapNames and their network of affiliated registrars will snap up virtually all of the expiring domain names each day, and then attempt to auction them off with a starting price of around $59.

If you’re the only bidder, you’ll end up getting a $9 domain name for $59. If you’re not the only bidder, the final price will depend on what other bidders are willing to pay for the domain.

The disadvantage of investing in expired domains this way, is that for many domains you will pay 6x what you could have paid if you registered the expired domain name on your own.

An alternative to using services such as SnapNames, is to get a software such as NameGrabber, which will allow you to snap domain names from your desktop PC. You simply enter the domain names you’re attempting to register and the date range for the requests, and the software takes it from there. NameGrabber can pay for itself with just a couple of domain registrations, and is definitely worth a try.

And if you find that the big companies are getting the domains first, keep in mind that SnapNames, for example, will drop the expired domains that it snapped up after the 5 day grace period if the domains don’t sell at auction. Just set your NameGrabber time period to cover the date 4-5 days after the original drop.

Domains can valuable not just for the domain name itself, but also for the existing traffic the previous owner may have built to that domain, which could be tens or hundreds of thousands of visits per month.

There are various criteria you can look at when searching for valuable domains, and there are some essential domain search tools that allow you to search for expiring, expired, and auction domains, and filter your results based on values such as Google PageRank, AlexaRank, DMOZ Entry, Indexed Pages, Traffic, etc.

Check out these dropped domain search tutorials for useful tips and tricks and domain name search techniques.

You can get an idea of how many domains are dropping each day, and go through the lists manually by downloading the name drop list from NameJet. However, we do recommend using some of the tools listed in the Resources below for better evaluation and catching of dropped domains.

Resources:

Written by Domains Bulletin · Filed Under Expiring Domains

Comments

Comments are closed.