Domain Magnate

There has been an unusually high amount of clearance sales and cheap lots posted for sales lately. People are likely coming back from the summer vacations and discovering that the renewals are coming, so trying to sell some names cheap and quick to raise money. This is the perfect opportunity for low budget domain resellers and flippers to go bargain hunting.

Before you dive into this it’s important to not get carried away buying too many domains, so check each one carefully.

How to evaluate the names?

• Google search counts estimation tool – as the main tool to estimate the popularity of the keyword
  
• WordTracker free search counts tool with Google Trends – to get a “second opinion” on the search volumes
  
• Google.com – to check for potential end users, advetisers and evaluate competition for the keyword terms
• Estibot Sales History – containing the largest history of reported domain sales it’s a great tool to see what people are buying
• Your Common Sense – sorry, no link for this one, you’ll have to Google it yourself..

Where to find them?

• DNForum Fixed Price Under $100
• NamePros Fixed Price Domain Sale
• DigitalPoint Domains for sale

What to Buy?

That will ultimately depend upon your purposes.  Higher search count .net and .org names can be good to build a site to rank it in Google and monetize. Lower search count .com names can be used to try to sell to end users, or simply resell on the forums or auctions. Buy when you have an idea what you plan to use the domain for: development, flipping, investment, addition to the portfolio, or anything else. And once you bought it make sure to bring those plans into action as soon as possible. Countless domains are being purchased just because it “looked like a good deal at that time” and when the time comes to renew them – they are dropped. So buy smart!

Today it’s exactly 5 years since I became a member of DigitalPoint forums and it was always an important part of my business. I got started with my web business there, learned most of the basics and picked up some of my best earning sites there for rather cheap, sold many domains for good prices back in the day when people were willing to pay high for aged domains, bought and sold tons of links and services. Also hired a lot of people with many of whom I still work today.

While the marketplace is simply HUGE it’s not a place to sell or buy domains for domainers. DP members mostly don’t understand the value of domains, it is however the best place to buy cheap, bulk seo services, backlinks, web design and site building services, hire data entry people and much more. From an average thread I make about willing to buy some links for my sites, or looking to hire a writer, or designer I usually get 30-50 pms. Imagine that: you want to hire someone to design your sites and all you need to do is make a small post with information on what you need and request the designers to send samples and pricing. In a day you’ll have 30+ inquiries to choose from. Sort them by pricing and quality and pick the best one.

The vast amounts of people willing to do almost any simple job for pennies is truly overwhelming there. The extremely brutal competition on DP makes people lower the prices for their services to such ridiculous amounts that I can hardly understand how they make a profit on it.

You can hire a full time link builder, data entry person or a virtual assistant there for just $250 per month. 200+ hours for $250 which comes down to just about $1 per hour. However lets not forget that while this is merely 1/15 of a salary in the US, it’s considered a good amount to earn per month in most of the 3rd world countries. And for $400-500/month you can hire a really experienced SEO person there for a full time job to take care of all the seo needs on your sites. That is even less than most companies charge for SEO services.

Outsourcing has truly become global and DP plays an important role in the process by enabling both the service providers and service buyers find each other easily, quickly and without any additional fees. That is unlike all the freelance sites that profit well from both sides.