How To Sell Domain Names
After domain acquisition, if you are not planning on using them as described above, your final goal should be selling each name – ideally at a big profit!
You may sell an expired domain name immediately after buying, or you may wait for some time before selling it. Either way you want to have some sense of the price range you might expect for it when you do sell.
The best way to figure out what a good selling price would be, do some research on other expired domain names. This information is available easily from the auction sites themselves, and we have some examples below. Internet research will tell you what prices similar domain names were sold for, and after what period.
Let’s consider some approaches to selling a domain name. The simplest method is to make a website and list all the domain names you have. You can then provide your contact information on the site itself so that prospective buyers can contact you. However, this method requires extensive marketing on your part or you’ll never get the relevant audience to see what you have. Simply listing the domain names on your website wouldn’t help, unless you have a very popular website already and believe your for-sale domains would be of interest to the people already coming to the site.
A better method for selling expired domain names is an auction site. These include general auction sites like eBay (ask for our report on making money with eBay for a lot more information) and specialized auction sites for domains only.
Good auction sites do the marketing for you – they attract considerable targeted prospective buyers, and these people want to buy domains or they wouldn’t be there. You don’t have to worry about making and managing a webpage to list your domain names. And most importantly you can monitor and control the price at which you would like to sell the domain names easily, from anywhere.
eBay and AfterNic
There are literally hundreds of auction sites on the Internet with different varieties of auction types and rules. For the purpose of this guide we recommend beginners try to sell domain names using eBay, as it is the largest and the most popular auction site on the Internet today.
The most significant domains-only auction site is afternic.com.
Both eBay and afternic have similar functionality including reserve pricing, and buy it now pricing. Those familiar with eBay will find afternic an easy transition although there are some differences. Afternic makes it easier to cancel bids or auctions, the contract requirements are less, and the auctions may be quite long in duration. Ebay offers much greater exposure but to a much less specialized audience, and shorter auctions. Take a look at both and see what you like better.
For the regular domain broker afternic.com also offers appraisal services for only $19.99 to members who are unable to assess the value of the domain name. This is helpful in setting a price, if you don’t know where to start.
There are other places to sell your domains, but we recommend starting with eBay, afternic, or both.