How To Make Money Buying and Selling Domains And Websites
The massive growth of the Internet is like the goldrush of the 1800s all over again. There are thousands of opportunities to get wealthy from doing business online and smart business people have been speculating on Internet "property" since the early 1990's. Property? Yes believe it or not the buying and selling of Virtual Real Estate (VRE) is huge business. Absolutely massive!
So what is this real estate made up of? Two things. Domain names and websites. Both of these can be sold for sums of money that most people would simply find incredible - especially considering that these things actually only exist online - they're not a tangible thing.
Domain Names
Let's look at domain names first. In the early days of the Dotcom boom domain registration and trading reached a fever pitch. People spent days and weeks finding and buying the latest hot domains and putting them up for sale to the highest bidder. What most people and companies were crying out for was short or ideally single word domain names. For exam Cheap.com or Books.com or one of the most highly publicized was Drugs.com.
Drugs.com itself cost the original owner/registrar $70 in registration fees. After several years and some delays the domain was finally sold for $823,456. That's just shy of one million dollars for a single domain name. That's $823,386 in profit!
That's not the highest amount ever paid though. Both Linux.com and Wallstreet.com both sold for over $1,000,000. The all time record so far is Altavista.com which sold for $3.35 million. Domains are still worth an awful lot of money to the right people - if they really want that domain name then they'll pay up for it.
The process of registering a domain name like Linux.com is now illegal. US Congress passed a bill preventing what is known as cybersquatting. Unless you have a legitimate real world business use for such a domain you can be forced to return ownership of the domain to the parent company and you won't be compensated for your loss.
Websites
The other aspect of online real estate is selling websites. These can be brand new websites or websites that have been established for years. Sometimes these websites are bought just for the value of the actual domain itself and sometimes for both the domain and the content of the site. One online entrepreneur (a guy named Ed Dale) recently sold his portfolio of websites for $5,000,000. Websites regularly sell on Ebay for thousands of dollars to interested buyers all over the world.
Buying and selling domains online is still profitable but the search for truly valuable domains is getting tougher each day. That being said with some creativity and lateral thinking you can still register some really great domains and with a little bit of work turn that domain into a healthy profit. People are buying and selling domains as we speak.
If you're interested in selling your existing website then you should check out a website broker that I've used them several times in the past and found their service and the quality of their buyers to be excellent. They provide a great service for anyone interested in buying or selling a website.