Chris Porter

I have a couple of hundred “crappy” domains – domains that have terrible keywords and only real value lies in the fact at some point in the past they were owned by a company who then let it expire for one reason or another. This usually means they have links and traffic.

Domain names is something I’ve got into quite heavily since June of this year after spotting a marketplace of domains completely untapped. I started hunting for domains with value to sell on and created SavedNames.com – I’ve found selling to the end-user directly can be a quick way to flip domains without too much initial investment.

A while back I bought a domain company-llc.com at auction for $20 and parked it. The old owner had shifted to companyllc.com (not something I realised at the time) and didn’t care about the hyphenated version anymore. At some point we email corresponded and they rejected my offer to sell them the domain for $100.

I later realised not only did the domain rank first for their company name (with the non-hyphenated version nowhere to be seen) but after, what I can only assume was some new marketing campaign or piece of press, the domain received 1129 visitors in one day. Resulting in 142 clicks and $72.08 revenue for the day. It’s quickly dwindled down but this month alone it’s earned over the $100 I was asking for it.

And it still ranks first for the company name.

Maybe it’s time to offer them the domain again.