How to Make Money Online by Selling Domain Names

Many webmasters have found that it is quite profitable to sell domain names. If a domain name has built in with a line of traffic, it will be much profitable. Some domain names have generated thousands of dollars to webmasters. A few good domain names have even went as high as a million or more dollars, making the webmaster an instant millionaire. You too can start selling domain names and profit from your domain names business. Here’s a few basic steps you can follow to begin:

Step 1 – Do keyword research
First, you will need to do some keyword research to find a keyword that is highly searched but not used very often by other websites. A good keyword analyzer tool can do this for you. Word Tracker and Keyword Analyzer are two of the good tools you can use to research keywords but there is a cost involved for using them. If you don’t want to pay for a keyword analyzer tool. You may use the free ones to conduct keyword research. But the free ones only tell you how many times the keyword has been searched for the last month, they don’t let you know how much competition there is with a potential keyword like the paid keyword tools did. I would suggest you use paid keyword tools because they provide in-depth detail on the keywords you are researching. If money is an issue, you may find a keyword analyzer that offers a free trial, like Word Tracker does. You can always upgrade to the paid version once you use it to profit from selling a domain name.

Step 2 – Get a domain name
Once you have chosen your keyword, you need to buy a domain name and a good web hosting package. You might think you don’t need hosting since you are just going to sell the domain, but in order to sell it for big money, you need to create a website for your domain name and do some web promotion work to build in consistent traffic for your domain. Traffic is what sells a domain name for the higher dollar amounts. To be profitable your domain name needs a good flow of traffic.

Anyway, try to find a hosting package that will include both a web hosting service and a domain name. Because you don’t need to worry about transferring anything later.

When choosing the domain name, make sure your keyword is included. If your keyword has been registered by other as domain name, try adding a series of numbers or other letters with your keyword. If you wanted the keyword for your domain name to be “dogs” but it has been taken, you could try getting “dogs101” or “A1dogs”. Alternatively, you may try looking for a relevant keyword that isn't taken as a domain name. Either way, keep finding until you get an easy-to-remember yet keyword-rich domain name that still has a .com extension.

Step 3 – Create a website
Now, you have your domain name and are ready to move on to the next step which is creating a website. It doesn’t have to be the biggest website ever built, as a matter of fact, it could be just 5 to 10 page site. Write several keyword rich articles and create a simple site using a program like Microsoft Word. Just be sure you save them as a .html file.

Go ahead and sign up for Adsense or add a few affiliates to the page so that it looks like a resourceful website for your visitors. Any sales made or AdSense revenue generated from your site will be an added bonus.

Step 4 - Drive traffic to your website and grow your backlinks
Once you have uploaded your website, focusing on traffic is next. You can start out with purchased visitors as long as they are coming from quality websites like Google search engine, content blogs and etc; and not a form of incentive traffic (like paid emails) or a bot. After getting paid traffic for a while, you should start building backlinks / inbound links for your site. There are many free places you can post your url to get backlinks pointing to your site like directories, forums, and online classified ads. You can also write a few good articles related to your website’s topic and post them on article directories to get free quality backlinks and traffic. Furthermore, social marketing can also be used to generate traffic and build links.

Keep growing inbound links until you have a regular flow of traffic to your site. If you can get sufficient visitors, you will get an Alexa rating. If the rating is pleasing, look for a domain name appraisal to see how much roughly you can sell your domain name. This will give you a good idea of how much you can expect to make from selling the domain name. If the numbers aren’t as high as you like, don’t worry there will still be someone willing to give you a higher dollar amount because of the traffic you have built up already.

Step 5 – Sell your domain name
When you are satisfied with your website and the amount of traffic it receives, it’s time to put it on the domain name market for sale. You may want to sell it with your website on it, although it is not necessary. Once you have sold your domain name, you will simply transfer it over to the buyer’s account. Most of the time it is free to push a domain name from one account to another as long as the both of you have accounts with the domain name registrar.

When you have seen a profit from selling domain names, you can reinvest your earnings into another domain name, and possibly try getting an expired domain name this time that already has a nice flow of traffic to save you some time. This can be done over and over to create a nice income from selling domain names.