Selling Domain Names

If you believe Edwin John, author of Selling Domain Names there's plenty of money to be made if you have a web site name that someone (hopefully a big company) wants. He reports that Mercury.com sold for $700,000! ClearDay.com sold for $60,000 and CityGuide.info went for $4,700.

USA Today estimates that there are somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people who make a living selling domain names  and they speculate that as the good names disappear and Internet marketing and advertising grows, more money will get spent on buying a good domain name.

A reader recently wrote me and asked how to sell a domain name, so I did some investigation as to how you can join the fray. There are two basic ways to sell a domain name that you own. Either you sell it yourself or you use an Internet domain name broker.

Selling it yourself can happen in two ways. You can sit back just wait for someone to discover you, People typically discover your web site by using the whois search that looks up records of who owns specific domains. That means if you're looking to sell a name you should make sure that you're easy to find by entering your name, address, and phone as the site's owner and administrator. Or, if you want to be more proactive, you can build a web site using the domain name and state that the name is for sale on the site. Building the site means you stand a chance at building some traffic which drives the sales price higher.

The other alternative is to use a domain name broker and there are lots of them, some less reputable than others. One that I've heard some good things about so I'll use as an example is AfterNIC. This site works like an auction where you put a domain name up for sale and wait for the highest bidder. Most sites on AfterNIC these days are selling for somewhere between $100 and $1,000, a far cry from the multi-thousand dollar sales during the Internet bubble.

Another popular one is Sedo. At Sedo, they'll take your listing for free and then charge a commission (10 percent is usually the minimum and then it scales based on the sales price). Sedo also suggest "parking" your domain with them, that is moving your web site over to their domain where they'll basically put a for sale sign on it. You'll earn money on the site, even while it's being sold, because Sedo puts targeted ads on it. Another popular one is GreatDomains where there's a 10 percent transaction deducted from your sales price.

I wouldn't use this as my get rich quick scheme, but if you've amassed some domains, as I have, they're probably worth something and if you're not using them anymore, you might as well try selling.

For more detailed information on selling a web site you might check Internet Gold Rush.