There are about 60k domain names expiring everyday. Most domain names expire because their owners stop caring about them, while a minor portion of them simply forgot to renew or there have been error with their credit card auto renewal transaction. These minor portion of domain names are among the most worth-to-invest domain names.
If you are interested in investing on domain names, feel free to also read our guide on How to purchase an expired domain name.
What to look for when choosing expired domain names to invest
Why an expired domain name can be bid from hundred of dollars to up to millions of dollars? Well, the ways we usually value a domain names are from how meaningful the domain is and the background history of the domain names.
Simplicity and search volume of domain keywords
A domain name that has a very simple word which is highly searched on the search engine every day would cost at least tens of thousands of dollars. For example, if let’s say computer.com expired (or the owner sells it) and it gets onto the auction, you can be be certain that it will be bid to millions of dollars.
Backlinks History
This is, in fact, the most common reason why most webmasters opt to invest in expired domain names for their new or secondary websites instead of getting a brand new domain. Backlinks, as you may have already know, is the reason why a webpage can be ranked higher than others. We won’t be explaining much about what are backlinks and SEO stuffs in this post as it may explodes the page. With decent quality of backlinks, it can certainly give an initial boost to your new business.
What you can do with an expired domain name
Create quality contents based on the topic niche and monetize on it
If you have got yourself a domain name with good amount of quality backlinks, you may want to produce quality contents on it and monetize on it. While you may ask if you can write a completely different niche than how the domain was previously related to, based on what we have been experimenting, writing a different niche than how the domain was linked (anchor texts relativity) would do more harm than good.
If you are looking to write tech articles, be sure to look for domain names related to it as close as possible. Anchor texts are much more important than the amount of backlinks. In our experiment of two websites with similar niche running on an expired domain name with good backlinks but not related to the subject and an newly created domain name, surprisingly (or not), the new domain name rank better than the other.
Google practices natural links. If links seems to be unnatural, it would just bring harm. It doesn’t worth for you to spend money on a domain with good backgrounds for something you are not interested to write about.
Sell it at a much higher price
If you spot a domain that deserve higher price, grab it and resell it later. Investors are not always available 24/7. There are still some very high quality domain names these investors would have missed out.
Redirect to your website for link juice
Please be warned that this may actually do more harm than good if it’s not done correctly. We can’t give you much info on this, but if you are redirecting a domain name with a closely similar niche to your website, you can actually give a slight boost to your SEO rankings. Try not to redirect more than 2 domain names at once to your website as it will certainly be suspicious as a spam.