Shakespeare’s Juliet may have said “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, but it’s a good bet that Juliet hadn’t ever tried to pick a good domain name for her website. It’s an even better bet that she didn’t try to place a value on the name when the time came to sell it, something more and more people are facing today. Whether you are selling your domain because you have closed up a website or you have decided to try your hand at the domain buying and selling game, you’ll need to know how much that domain name is worth.

There are stories of people who have found the perfect domain name and sold it for enough money to retire on. There are people who buy domain names that are slight misspellings of some famous, trademarked domain, in the hopes of getting traffic through typos which will make their name valuable as advertising space. There are people who buy hundreds of thousands of domain names through discount and reseller programs, feverishly snapping up expired names, hoping they have found several winners.

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No one can deny that the Internet is here to stay and that businesses who do not embrace the internet are going to struggle in the coming years. With the Internet and Search Engines reaching a new level of maturity, I have noticed in their rankings that they are beginning to put more and more weight on the age of the domain in their index and because of this we have now reached a crossroad for many businesses to evaluate whether they are better off buying an existing domain versus registering a brand new domain. But Buyer Beware!

I have met many many people who have benefited and also been burnt by buying existing domain names. The major disadvantage of buying an existing domain name is that it may have been banned from the search engines for in appropriate search engine tactics, better known as black hat techniques. My own personal experience with the search engines and trying to talk to a human being in the past to plead my case over an issue with one of our own domains has made me come to the realization that none of them have a clue of what customer service is and they do not care what they do to you and this is where the problem lies when buying existing domains.

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Buying parked domains is a bit of a black art. It’s often also a test of your detective skills. Plus you will need a dose of patience and some good negotiation skills. When you are buying a parked domain name, luck also plays its part.

So, how to buy parked domains?

Firstly you’ve got to find a parked domain before you can think of buying one. That’s fairly easy. Go to a service like NameBoy.com and type in a couple of your preferred keywords. This will bring up a list of all sorts of vaguely related domain names. NameBoy is good at thinking outside the box and will often come up with variants on a name that you’d never have considered before. I’ll leave it up to you as to whether this is a good or a bad thing but when I’m looking to buy a parked domain name, I find it a good place to start.

Then you need to start copying and pasting the domain names into your browser.

Some will come up as live domains, some will be clearly identified as parked domains and yet more will fall into a no-mans land. Kind of the scrap heap of the internet.

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