This is due to several factors:

• Domain "Squatters" -  People / companies who register and hold domain names for years, with the hope of cashing in a few years later when the value for the domains are high.
• Abandoned Sites – Someone registered a domain name and had the good intentions of setting up a website, but never quite got to it.
• Brand Equity – Sometimes a person would register all domains names that sound alike to protect his brand. That includes all .net, .org, .info and other variants

All single word domains have probably been registered years ago. Catchy two-word domains are hard to come by unless you get lucky – so the next best option would be 3-word domains. But hold on..

Just because a domain name has been registered, it does not mean that you can’t get your hands on it. Let me show you how I got some great domain names using not-so-secret but severely overlooked methods that are easy and works most of the time.

GoDaddy’s "Back Order" Domains

Sometimes I get excited when I find a domain name, and register it without thinking twice. One year later when it’s time to renew my domain, I may decide to let it go as by then I’d probably have accumulated a lot of domains from this rather bad habit

And guess what – there are a lot of others who do the same thing! Every day thousands of good, catchy domains expire.

GoDaddy allows you to "back order" domains, which basically means "order now, get it later". Each order gets you a "credit" which lasts for one year and can be transferred to other domains. GoDaddy will attempt to secure your domain automatically, and they will inform you when it’s successful.

When you backorder a domain name, the moment the previous owner decides to let it go you’re the most likely person to get it.

For example lets say the domain name ProfitBlogger.com expires one month from now. If you backorder this domain and I don’t renew it when time’s up, you get the domain. If I do renew it however, you get to apply the "credit" to other domain names that you want to get. 

The trick to using this method is to determine the expiry date of a domain, and the only tool you need to use is WhoIs.sc – make sure the domain name has less than a year to go. Once you’ve backordered a domain, no one else will be able to do it via GoDaddy so that’s a bit reassuring!

Some domain names I’ve secured with back orders:

• PLRBlogger.com – $18.99
• BlogSecret.com – $18.99

I also have several active backorders for domain names expiring within the next 6 months.

Buy Deleted Domain Names

When a domain expires and it not backordered by someone, it becomes a deleted domain. You can find thousands of such domains at DeletedDomains.com. This site used to be free, but now you have to pay XX a year to subscribe to their service. When you do you’ll be able to wade through thousands of domains deleted in the past 24 hours up to a year ago.

Use their search function and subscribe to alerts based on keywords you want in your domain. You have to be quick, or the good domains usually get bought by squatters.

GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket

Domain squatters sometimes decide it’s time to cash in, and they start looking for buyers. GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket (TDNAM) is where you’ll find a lot of these people selling off rather good domains for pretty cheap. They do it through three methods:

1. Buy Now – The owner has already listed a selling price. Meet it and the domain is yours.
2. Offer /Counter Offer – The seller has a suggested price. Make and offer and he can counter or accept your offer.
3. Highest Bidder – Bid for the domain name. If you’re the highest bidder, you get it.

Although it requires you to search and browse through many crappy domains, you do get to find gems in here.  The trick is to use the search feature properly, and also add desired domains to your "Watch List" to monitor price changes and bids.

Some of the domain names I’ve secured with from TDNAM:

• IncomeAutomated.com – $10
• ProfitResponse.com – $10
• PLRSecret.com – $10
• AutopilotBlogger.com – $5
• AutoresponderProfit.com – $100

* To use TDNAM you have to subscribe to it, which costs $4.99 / year

Buy Domains From SitePoint

SitePoint.com is another place you can buy domains. With this site however negotiations are strictly between you and the owner, with no third-party help. Domain owners usually buy a listing here and go to great lengths to convince you that their domain is worth the price.

You can buy domains with no traffic, or a little bit of traffic if it has been used and promote before. You can also buy domain names with the entire website.

Make An Offer They Can’t Refuse, Via Sedo

Sedo.com is quite like GoDaddy’s TDNAM, but you’ll find really good domains here and they usually also cost a lot too.

Even if a domain is not for sale on Sedo, you can still benefit from the site. They have a feature where they help you to negotiate the purchase of domain names from the current owner. You remain anonymous until the sale is completed.

You make an offer for the domain, and Sedo conveys that to the domain owner. He can then counter your offer, accept it or reject it without further negotiation. Start low but not too low, and counter offer as much as possible till both parties are satisfied with the price. If you start off with a ridicu
lous price you’ll
get no response, so be realistic. Some domains are worth a lot of money, and the owner probably knows it

They also send you a "domain appraisal" report as part of the service.

Domains I’ve got from Sedo:

• BlogProfit.com – $700
• ProfitBlogger.com – $1,800

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Some of you may have seen something like the image above if you visited my blog in a few days- my domain got parked by GoDaddy. In fact I managed to renew it just in time before the domain expired and was put under GoDaddy’s expired domains market, which would mean that I will have to pay USD1,000+/- to get it back. Luckily for me, I had to pay only regular domain renewal fees.

In my case it was not a typical rookie mistake. I DID put my domain on auto-renew ever since I bought it but the problem is last month the credit card I’ve been using for over 5 years expired, and I was issued a new card. This meant that any recurring payment using the old card will fail as the new card has a different security number (at the back of the card).

To make things worse, during the renewal date I was in Indonesia for a 5-day holiday and had almost no Internet access. I went online for a couple of minutes but there were so many emails, I must have missed the warning notice from GoDaddy.

All things said, it was still rather silly on my part.

This brings me to an interesting topic – silly things we do as marketers.

Here’s a list of them, tell me if you’ve done any of it before:

1. Anti Domain-Auto-Renewal - As I mentioned in the story above. I’ve lost one or two domains before from this but those domains were not critical to my business. Still, the guy who got it just put up a “domain parking” page with loads of ads and is probably still getting some cash out of it.
2. Bad English Domains – I’ve done this with 2 domain names. The funny thing just as you hit the “Order” button you suddenly realize the spelling error but it’s just too late and you’re stuck with that domain for a year.
3. See Only, Don’t Buy – I once spent $230 a day in AdWords and got up the next morning to zero sales. I realized not too log after that the order link was broken – and I felt like a total idiot.
4. Neighborly Love is Bad - I once wrote the wrong address for my Aweber commissions, resulting in the checks being sent to my neighbor. Luckily for me, he had already move out by then and I retrieved my check from his mail box after checking my Aweber affiliate profile.
5. Who Moved My Affiliate Checks? – Sometimes people move around. I moved from apartment to house to apartment (5 times) in the past 4 years and I’m pretty sure there were some miniscule affiliate programs I signed up with that finally sent me a check – just to the wrong address!
6. Wrong Paypal Address – I did this once, send a huge sum of money to the wrong person. The I had to file a dispute and only through the grace of the receiver did I get my money back.
7. Come See My Download Files – In Cpanel you can choose to disable indexes of your directories. This way when someone types in yoursite.com/images they wont be able to see a listing of all the images. Most importantly, if they type in yoursite.com/download and you have no index page there (htm/html/php) they will be able to steal your products. If you have a WordPress blog, try typing in yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins and you will see what I mean
8. Premature Ejaculation- I’ve sent out an email for an affiliate product that read “Product X Is Live Now” only to realize that it would a good 12 hours before that happened. In my case you could forgive me because converting between time zones can be confusing.
9. Backups Are For Wimps - It’s soo easy to delete stuff, and by “stuff” I mean anything from your website files, your e-book source MS Word files, your database (MySQL databases are very easy to delete, just one click) and even your important emails with your login details. Then you realize you didn’t create a backup and you’re screwed. No choice but to spend another 15 days re-writing the same ebook.
10. [yourname, [fistname], Who’s Name? – How many times have you sent out an autoresponder broadcast email and got the variables wrong? Instead of getting “Hello Gobala” you get “Hello [firstname” – this always happens when: (a) You have more than one autoresponder service and each uses different variables, and you “copy and paste” carelessly (2) you typed in the variables manually, and you made a typo, oops!

Well there you go, 10 silly mistake even Internet marketing veterans make. I made all 10 of them, how many have you got?

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