Deleted Domain Names

Think all of the good domain names have been taken in the past? Well, you are probably right.

The good news is that people are letting them expire and you have a second chance of getting them.

Some people were scooping up domain names by the hundreds or thousands, a couple of years back. The problem is, they have to keep renewing them year after year. If they haven't done anything with those domain names, they are likely simply costing them money.

So they let them expire, which frees them up for you to take.

Why Consider Another Domain Name or Two?

There are many reasons why you may want to browse through available domains now and then.

A better name for your business - If your site is in need of a better name, you may find one suddenly available. Perhaps it is simply shorter or more memorable. On the other hand, it might be a nice keyword rich domain name for your site.

Existing traffic - an expired name may still have hundreds of links to it from other sites. This is a great opportunity to get a site name with instant traffic attached to it.

Resell it - If you see a domain name that might be a perfect fit for another business, you could buy it and then resell it. There are people doing this part time for some nice side income. Simply keep an eye on an available domain and then broker it to a business that may be willing to pay good money for it.

For example, as of this morning "deli-food.com" is available. How about a quick contact to a few appropriate businesses with this proposal:

"Hi we would like to sell our domain name deli-food.com to a company which could benefit from having such a highly memorable domain name. We would be willing to sell it for under $100 to you if you are interested. Please let us know a.s.a.p. as we have approached several other companies for this as well, and we are expecting it to go quickly."

You could sell it for $99 on an $8.95 investment of a godaddy.com registration. Not a bad deal.

This is actually a potentially lucrative online business model for someone who is interested in doing that. You could even find a great domain name for your domain name broker business. I just checked, domain-agents.com is available as of 3 days ago...

Deleted Domain Cycle

Here is the life cycle of a domain name:

• Registration - someone typically registers it from 1 - 10 years. If they don't renew it right away at the end of the registration period, it...
• Goes on hold - Typically the domain registry gives you up to 45 days to renew your expired registration. This varies by registrar. The domain name is typically still working and sending traffic where it is supposed to. If it continues to go unregistered, the next step is...
• Redemption period - For the next 30 days, the name is in a sort of limbo called the redemption grace period. It is not up for people to buy it yet, but it also doesn't send traffic to the site anymore. It can still be reregistered by the original owner.
• Deletion - It takes about 5 dates for it to actually be deleted around the internet. It still can not be bought by the general public.
• Available - Its back up for resale.

Domain Name Tools

There are some great resources available to you to start hunting for expired domain names. They include:

Domain Name Pro - This program lets you input a list of expired domain names that you may be considering. It then reports the Alexa rating, link popularity and what the actual status of the domain name is. You can easily sift through hundreds (or thousands) of possible domain names to find out which ones make the most sense to grab. When used right, Domain Name Pro can easily pay for itself with the free traffic you would get from finding the right domain names.

deleteddomains - This is another favorite of mine. It lets you search for recently expired or soon to be expired domains. You can see the ones which are available as of today or (my preference) the power search. The power search lets you type in the words you want it to search for and specify thinks such as the longest you want the name to be etc. Great free tool. Similar services are offered through www.pool.com and www.directnic.com/, but I prefer deleteddomains.

I have had good success finding great domain names lately. I have scooped up some 4 letter domains as well as some memorable, shorter domains.

I just took a look at this mornings available names. I came across these which would be attractive to the right businesses: activebars.com (nightlife portal site), cafe-click.com (internet cafe), getmypizza.com (pizza shop), gospamless.com (spam filtering company), soextreme.com (gaming site? - not porn!)...

Hopefully you get the idea. That is just today's new names available. By checking through them now and then you are likely to come up with some pretty desirable domain names. You can either use them yourself or become a name broker and make a quick profit.