What are the best ways to make a domain valuable?

**johnny21** · August 21st, 2010, 12:10 AM

Hi I am looking to purchased domain's. I was wondering what are the best ways to make a domain valuable? I've heard about parking them but I don't want to wait. Would it be possible to find a good domain and simply put it up for sale right away or do I have to do some stuff to it first? Thanks for you info.

**JockP** · August 21st, 2010, 1:39 AM

All the above options are viable.

yes you can buy a domain and flip...just think who would be/ get the most out of the domain if you flip.

or there is the devlopment option...this is where I like to play.

There are a lot of domain owners out there that are too lazy to go and develop their whole domain portofio or learn how to. And for them, that works becuase they were probably able to register at cost and they have the perfect passive income (capitol growth) then they sell them.

for those that are new to the interent all good domains are gone.

Thus buying a domain off an owner, building it up, making it profitable and then holding or selling.

you will find plenty of info about that around the place.

**tradedemon** · August 21st, 2010, 8:25 PM

The easiest way (not necessarily the least time consuming way) is to build a site on a domain and add value to it like that.

I've been in the business of websites for a couple of years and I'll tell you one thing, buying a domain and flipping it quickly isn't easy. It takes a lot of research and hard work. I'm personally no good at it, and although I don't want to discourage you from it, I will say that you might be better off simply learning the ropes of adding value to a site by building a site on it.

**Shawn** · August 21st, 2010, 9:17 PM

Parking a domain with one of the common ad sponsored gateways (adsense for domains, godaddy, and so on) won't make you much, and won't help you sell it either. I usually put up a page with a potential business idea on it, it's own color scheme, and a "domain for sale" section. No, I won't make any immediate cash from ads (even the nickle/day that I might make with adsense for domains), but when the domain *does* sell (and much sooner) I can pocket more cash. Here's a couple samples:

**ian** · August 22nd, 2010, 1:16 AM

Chalk up another vote for developing a domain into a valuable asset. Sure domains by themselves can fetch a huge amount, but if you have traffic, subscribers/customers and most importantly, profit, then that will sky rocket the value of your property.

Now how you develop it is a whole other kettle of fish...

**Fish** · August 22nd, 2010, 1:35 AM

Selling domains does take some practice. You should go over to namepros or the DN forum to start learning. If you jump into domains now, you will have to work quite a bit to make decent income - there are no shortcuts. You have to learn what makes a domain desirable, and then you'll have to learn how to sell.

You can get a domain for $10 and sell it for $800, but the trick is knowing which ones are likely to sell. If you buy 80 domains at $10 each, and sell one for $800, you break even for all your effort. Sometimes, average domains sell for a surprisingly good price. Other times, you might have a domain that is perfect for several dozen companies, and none of them will want it. Then you have to decide whether to keep paying renewal fees on that name in the hopes that someone will change their mind.

If you want to make a quick sale, buy a domain that would provide value to several companies. Collect a list of those companies and contact each individually. Before you do this, be ready to explain why it would be worth XXX dollars to them. Because the name "sounds cool" wouldn't be a good reason. Either buy:

1- Exact keyword names that would bring in a good number of searches for that business or
2- Names that improve on an existing domain. For example, AcmeTrucking.com to a trucking company called Acme that now uses AcmeTruckingInc.com. However, this is better if there are at least 3 or 4 companies that could use the domain. If you target just one company, they might get annoyed and tell you to shove off, and you will be stuck with the name nobody else can use. If you look, you will be surprised at the numbers of companies with identical names in some cases.

Better yet, develop...that's why I'm here. For example, someone bought newyork-mortgage.com from a Godaddy premium listing for $200. I paid $10 for it last year, if I remember correctly (my bad record keeping). Obviously, the guys who bought it think they can make a whole lot more than $200 by developing it. At this point, I'd rather be them than me. But at least I can watch and see what they do with it.

Ironically, some of the best deals come from domain flippers who run short of cash and have to drop names near renewal time. That would be most of them.

**Shawn** · August 22nd, 2010, 7:32 AM

@Fish, that's been my experience, too. Any market like this depends on the *perceived* value, not the actual value. If you can't convince the right people that the domain you've got is worth anything, it isn't. I make about $500/year selling domains. That's not much at all really, but it does help with my domain addiction. Some of the stupidest domains I had were the ones that sold for the most - and they were the ones I wanted to develop for myself!

Oh well. Who has the time to develop *every* site they think of?

**Clinton** · August 22nd, 2010, 7:58 AM

Some excellent posts already especially from fish and Shawn.

In page 3 of my article for Sitepoint on valuing websites, I've listed some factors that add value to a website. Many of them also add value to a domain including
- inbound links
- age
- brand value (like escrow.com - most people associate escrow with escrow.com, but it's only a domain, and it's leased out to a company called IES)
- others.

In addition to those, one action that could add value to the domain is to accumulate a set. Buyers of fantasticandles.com may prefer the brand protection if you can also offer them fantasticandles in the .org, .net, .co.uk and other main TLDs/ccTLDs.

**blreeves** · May 14th, 2011, 5:17 PM

I started buying domain names in 1996. I started with just two or three that I developed as personal websites. I still have one of them to this day (www.reevesregistry.com). After a while I decided to start buying domains based on keywords that were easy to remember. I almost always purchased .com names. In a few cases I purchased the .com, .org and .net for the same name. I rarely strayed outside of the big three TLD's although I have a few .info and .us names now. At first I didn't really think much about selling the domain names I was buying. Most of the ones I bought were purchased because of an idea I had for a website.

Over the years, I built a number of sites with my names. A few of them made me a little money, but being a programmer for the last 38 years, building websites was more for entertainment purposes than for making a profit. Then about five or six years ago I received an email from Network Solutions that someone was interested in buying one of the domains I had registered with them. I had purchased the domain (impactlogic.com) in 2001 and so far had not done anything with it. The interested buyer made me an offer to which I countered the offer. After two or three exchanges, we settled on $750 for the domain. Not really bad since I had less than $100 invested in registration fees for the domain. After that, I sold several more domains for between $50 and $150. It was enough to offset the registration fees for my other domains, so I was pretty happy.

I have always looked at domain names as long term investments. When I bought a domain, I usually had a specific idea in mind for a website or thought that the name would be more valuable as time went by. I definitely buy more than I sell.

Until last year, I was in buy and hold mode with my domains. I have built up a pretty good collection of domain names (about 155 at last count). Now in the last year or so I have sold two domains (adcycles.com) and (gologics.com) for $250 and $750 respectively. Not enough to make a living on, but not bad either. In both cases, the buyer approached me. I have tried selling domains on Godaddy Auctions and Ebay in the past, but these always sold for under $100.

Since most of my domains are .com names and were purchased more than five years ago, I think that some of them at least may be pretty valuable as domains go. Almost all of my domains are composed of one, two or three keywords with no dashes or numbers.

I'm looking for advise on how and where to sell some of my domains so that I can get the best prices for them. Are their specific things I can do to make them more valuable before putting them up for sale?

**Clinton** · May 19th, 2011, 2:32 PM

Hi blreeves, and welcome to experienced-people.net

Thanks for sharing all that info and prices on domains you sold.

One way of improving the value of a domain is to put some on-topic content on it and get a couple of links before salting it away (as others have already advised). It then accumulates age as a "site" rather than just a domain and that's worth more to many buyers. I would also put some discreet text on the homepage stating that the site is available for sale. Many webmasters (and scripts) are crawling the web everyday looking for sites that have terms like "this website for sale", "buy this website" etc.