Registering a domain name is an investment and with any investment you want to be sure you know what your putting your money in. You can think sometimes that you have found the perfect domain. You go on to your favorite registrar, find it’s available and you hurry to the checkout and make the purchase. Domaining often times is like that, it can get competitive and if you don’t slow down you can end up with a stocked inventory of domains that you just can’t sell.
There are many guidelines that you need to follow to be a successful domain flipper. There is no written rule how to make a profit or what the right domain to register is. There is however several guidelines that you should always remember to follow or else you could wind up in debt and in some cases legal trouble. The good thing is they are easy to follow check out the list we have compiled below.
Know your intentions.
You should always know what you intend to do with a particular domain before you purchase it. Do you plan on flipping the domain or is there the potential to develop. You should never register a domain just because it has a high keyword search or it because the name just sounds good. You have to try and think to yourself, “If I can’t sell this domain would I be able to develop a site?”
Even if you never plan on developing a site your domains it should always be on your mind with every domain. What gives domains there value is the potential and the more potential a domain has for an end user to develop a successful website the more money a domain will be worth.
It’s all in the name.
As stated earlier above, a domain name is only worth as much as its potential. As the internet grows finding quality domains to start a brand around are becoming more and more scarce. Some of the internet’s most successful websites (facebook, twitter, google, youtube etc.) have really nothing to do with what they offer within the name. Those website owner started a brand with an idea in mind.
That is why these short and catchy names are getting harder to find available. If you try to find one of these names make sure that its easily read and pronounced correctly. Suffice to say that even sites like fiverr.com confused everyone at first how it was pronounced.
Spelling is not a big deal with short names intended to brand, but if you are going after a long tail domain such as “howto” something .com you want to make sure everything is spelled correctly. Especially if you are going after a keyword domain with several words in it. Misspelled domains are only beneficial when they are miss-typed via direct traffic. You won’t get a lot of misspelled type in traffic with a long tail domain. It will be no good for google either as miss-typed words are auto corrected.
Is it marketable?
Domains that are marketable are domains that will hold their value the most. A domain that just says money can be flipped effortlessly. Before marketable domains were considered something that had buy, sell, trade but with today’s online marketplace there is literally a market for everything. Almost any type of ailment, sickness, skill, trade or scheme ever conjured has a digital product somewhere online. This is a big factor in the value of a domain.
Next time you are looking for domains and you come across one that you think is quality just take a look if there are any products that you can directly relate to. Check sites like clickbank.com and amazon.com these sites will have a product for almost anything that you or whoever ends up the owning the domain can make money from.
Make sure it’s clean.
Just because a domain shows up as available doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been registered in the past. Everyday thousands of domains are dropped by their owners and are again available to anyone who wants to register them. While this can be an excellent way to find a great domain at registration price, this can also be a great way to waste your money on a worthless domain.
Sometimes domain owners will use spam or other means or illegal seo methods that end up getting the domain sandboxed. This means a domain could be blocked out of search results all together. There are also domains that are blocked by google adsense.
You don’t want to sell a domain to someone with knowing its past, someone won’t be happy when they find out their blog isn’t showing up in the results. There are many sites out there that you can find if your site has been blacklisted. Just do a google search for domain blacklist check.
Is it trademark free?
You definitely want to steer clear of trademark domains. Even if you can get away with selling them for a while the repercussions aren’t worth it. You could get into a lot of legal trouble that won’t be fun. Not to mention most domain buyers and investors aren’t going want to buy your trademark domains. If you ever come across an excellent domain like facebookchat.com let it be, there’s a reason it’s available.
Hope this list here helps out any domainers that are new to the trade. Like As has been said before, there are many other things that you may want to keep in mind but this list should give you some good guidelines for your future domain purchases!