How Buying and Selling Domain Names can be a Multimillion Dollar Business

I want to start this article out by telling you straight out that the chances of you making a million dollars by selling the domain name are few and far between. Now you may be asking "Then why is this article here??", simply because there are domains out there that will sell for millions of dollars, but they are few and far between. However, people are successfully selling domains every day. The price can range from a mere $100, up to thousands of dollars, this is much more likely to happen. So before you go out and register something like "christmasgiftsrus.com" with the hopes of selling it for a cool million, don't! Do some research with the sites listed below, and find out what domains are selling for what and realize that after all, your domain may get you no more than the registration fee, if that. I don't want to turn you off from buying these names, but I want to make you aware that there is the chance you could end up losing money, and above all, I don't want to see that happen!

I talked to you all before about how some people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars... and up to millions of dollars just by selling domain names! You can do this too. Find a great domain name that hasn't yet been registered, register it and then sell it.

For example drugs.com was recently sold for $823,456! computer.com went for a paltry $500,000. A nice little retirement fund of $7.5 million ... yes that's million as in $7,500,000.00 ... was paid for business.com. WOW!

What I neglected to tell you before (yes, even I have lapses now and again!) was where you can buy and sell domain names! So here it is...

Register.com is a neat little site that makes it easy to look up domain names. You type in the name you want to do a search on, and they come back with information about whether or not the name is available for .com, .net or any of a dozen extensions you wish to search on. If the name is registered you can look up the registration data and find out who owns it.

If the name is available, you can register it on the spot... however, I would seriously recommend doing business with Internet Domain Registrars Their registration fees were some of the lowest available, and they are great people to work with. They will also park your domain and hold it for as long as you have it registered with them ... for free!

For those of you who are not familiar with the jargon ... "parking" a domain name means that though you register and own the domain name, you don't want an active Web site in place. ... basically what you want to do is "park" your domain in the back lot!

OK, you've come up with an incredibly brilliant name, you've registered it at Internet Domain Registrars, and you've either parked it or you're busy posting totally inspired copy for your site... and now you want to sell it.

How do you do that?

Well, there are two ways. One is going to Ebay.com Yes, Ebay now auctions off domain names. There are some on there that people are trying to sell for $2,000,000 (Yes, that's two million) that are worth no more than the registration fee itself! But there are also some on there that will really catch your attention and get you thinking "outside of the box" about other domain names.

When I checked earlier today, they had over 5000 domains listed for auction! You can check out what they have available today, and in past auctions... allowing you to see what some of the names have gone for. This alone can give you some awesome ideas when you go to register your domain names.

Another great site is GreatDomains.com It is another auction site where you can sell or buy domain names. The neatest thing about this site is the fact that they have listings of domain names that are for sale along with the current bids for the names.

There are dozens of names that now have an asking price of $1,000,000 or more ... and there are also domain names that are selling for under $1000. You might want to take a look at the differences between $500 names and names that sell for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars!

For example which one would you pay more for? ForSaleByOwner.com or zoozle.com?

Well ... it's really no contest! ForSaleByOwner.com recently sold for $835,000 ... while zoozle.com is still asking for $1000!

Now don't get me wrong here. Whoever buys zoozle.com COULD turn the website into a multimillion dollar concern ... while the ForSaleByOwner people could potentially put up a lousy money losing website. We simply can't predict who will be the ultimate winner in this race. What would YOU have paid for eBay.com a few years ago? Probably nothing! In the "buy the domain name contest" ... the more easily recognizable ForSaleByOwner.com easily wins out!

GreatDomains.com does charge a commission for sales and for a small fee they will handle the legalities of the sale, including the all important transfer of money.

For those who love to do it for themselves... domainNamesBuySell.com is a free listing service. There is some good buy/sell information at this site, however, I would caution you about doing too much of this on your own.

It is important to have good legal council in order to make sure the sale is legal. You also need to have some method of transferring money so that you actually get it! The phrase "it pays to be careful" comes to mind... however there are times in which you have to pay in order to be careful!

Oh ... and talking about legal stuff, a new law has been passed in the US restricting the purchase of celebratory and trade names. So anyone thinking of registering martinsheen.net and reselling it to the gentleman, will probably have to deal with The President's lawyer in person!