This is a 7 part series on some of the often overlooked ways you can sell domain names. My focus on these is to have as little additional work involved as possible – enough has already been written in how to actively market and sell domains (if you need a reference to some of this let me know). In retrospect, this overview of the 7 surprising (and simple) domain name sales methods should have come first (each tip article came first), but I’m glad I didn’t because part way through I swapped out number 6 with a better method.

Selling domain names has to ultimately end with the sale of your domain name and the following is a list of ways that I’ve either sold a domain or in one case a friend of mine made a sale. None of these methods took more than a few minutes time and are in addition to the normal sales channels.

Method number 1 has a little background so without further ado, here are the 7 methods:

Domain name sales method #1: Whois your most targeted buyer?

Domain name sales method #2: Take advantage of the oldest profession in the world (communication profession that is)

Domain name sales method #3: Track and analyze your parking statistics for upward trends

Domain name sales method #4: Set up an email account on your parked domains

Domain name sales method #5: Check out the domaining forums – seriously

Domain name sales method #6: Use a premium listing on domain sales sites

Domain name sales method #7: Forward your parked domains traffic to your sales page.

I hope you are able to take advantage of at least one of these – please let me know of your experiences and anything that might have worked for you in the comments below!

This is the final installment in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 6, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #7:

No Parking on the dance floor!

No parking baby! Telling my age a bit if you catch that reference..

Most domain owners who have parked domains have seen significant reductions in the Parked pages revenue and in a lot of cases a decline in traffic. If you have product domains or names that get any decent type in traffic you may be frustrated with your pennies you get from parking.

As an internet business, what is the most valuable thing you can have – traffic of course. And in this case your domain has VERY targeted traffic since people are typing it in their browser! Why not use domain forwarding and have all that traffic go to your domain sales page! Even better, have a sales page segmented by types of domains or in your Forward address and group like domains together!

You can also include a parameter like “domain=YourDomainName” so you can still track how much traffic is coming from each domain. This combination is surprisingly effective and while they are on your site they will often browse around quite a bit and possibly buy something or click an ad at the very least! I have used this process to forward like domains to an existing developed domain with a similar topic and it worked well for that, too! Be creative and don’t settle for just letting your domains gather dust – one sale and you can make more than the parking for all your domains for the entire year!

Good luck if you try this tip or any of the 7 for selling domain names!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

This is Part 6 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 5, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #6:

Resale markets like Afternic, Sedo and GoDaddy – with a Premium twist

If you have more than one or two domains then you probably have them listed for sale on Sedo, Afternic, Godaddy, or one of several other resellers. No secret there, but what you may not know is that several of these services have “Premium Listings”, not to be confused with other “Premium” services which require you to pay up front a fee to have your domain listed in more prominent areas of the domain search results.

Premium Listings, such as the Premium Domain Listings on GoDaddy, have a much heftier commission on the back end so you need to account for that in your price (currently they are at 30%).

That may seem like a steep price to pay, but the way they feature these domains is at a fixed price so you can account for that in your listing price. They get some pretty good results because when someone searches for a domain such as walkingshoes.com and it is listed as a Premium Listing they go straight to a sales page with the price ready to go. If there isn’t an exact Premium Listing available then one of the more prominent suggestions is to buy similar “premium” domains right beside where they suggest other extensions!

You don’t pay 20 or 30 or even 50 dollars to have it featured in a general category of domains (I’ve done this on Sedo and Godaddy with poor results) and it gets better placement because they do a good job of pattern matching what the original name search was for with the available domains in the Premium Auctions.

I know several people who have had great success with this and considering how few offers I’ve gotten recently on GoDaddy I’m definitely going to add more Premium Listings!

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #7 is coming soon!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

I have been looking at ways to make money with blogs and domain names and websites recently and I came across an eBook (free, so don’t sign off) from John Chow that is really well done.

John is one of the more prolific bloggers as far as making money blogging so it shouldn’t surprise you that he has a pretty good ebook. What is surprising is that it is free and full of good information and all it will cost you is your email address if you pick it up from his site. I’ve already downloaded it and he says it is free to redistribute so if you don’t want to give him your email you can find it here.

I generally take lots of notes and mark up documents as I read them so I thought I would just type them up and create a short list of tips for making money on your blog/domain in a review format. The following are my notes and comments/thoughts I had as I read the ebook:

Chapter 1 – it is an introduction, but it is really all about what I would term accountability. Take a look at this quote related to “Someday Never Comes”:

“When you talk to a successful person about his goals, he’ll tell you what he plans to do and when it will be done. When an unsuccessful person talks about his goals(assuming he even has one), you’ll hear something along the lines of “I hope to do this someday.” Here’s a clue for all you losers out there; someday never comes.”

Some people will call that quote mean or too blunt or say that it is overstating or oversimplifying. BS! Think back about a time when you were most productive or accomplished more than you thought possible. Usually people think of these times and they are related to a project with a specific due date or something they really enjoyed and knew had to get done. A work project with a deadline is really just a goal someone else imposed on you… also, the things you enjoy usually tend to get done and done well! Why not blend the two? John says you have to have a time limit or it isn’t really a goal. I think that is the very heart of a goal! So do something you enjoy and set timely goals!

Chapter 2 – Recommended Money Makers. No, I’m not talking about Chris Moneymaker or anything related to poker this time. In this chapter, John goes into different ways to make money on your blog.

First is content links – now this ASSUMES you have some really good content… Content links are great because you don’t have to sacrifice any ad slots in your primary advertising areas (usually following the F pattern). These types of ads read your content and dynamically place hyperlinks as ads as part of the text so it is easy to implement and pretty unobtrusive. He recommends Kontera and even lets you piggyback off his subscription because they usually won’t approve smaller blogs. I’m sure he gets some kickback or ad revenue, but who cares if it gets you in the door.

Next is Text Link Ads – I haven’t used a service like this before, but basically it looks like you are giving up your recommended/favorite sites section of your blog which makes it look like you are recommending whoever they place in they ad… I’m not too sure about this one since it is YOUR reputation you are selling… If anyone has any experience with this please let me know.

Google Adsense comes next and for the vast majority of people that is going to be the first network you experience. I like Adsense and they tend to display truly relevant links and they have text, image and video ads of all sizes so you can really fine tune your site and test different size ads with different layouts. Seems like a waste of time, but small changes make huge differences with adsense and almost any other network in terms of conversion (clicks in this case). He also mentions Bidvertiser, but unless you really need to get paid at $10 increments I can’t see the benefit.

This got much longer than I expected so I’ll post the rest later. Let me know what you think and whether you like to see links/reviews like this one.

~~ DomainNitro ~~