(This is part 3 of a multipart series on expired domain names.)

So what can Joe-Bob Marketer do to leverage expired domain names as part of his toolkit?  First of all, don’t let anyone blow smoke up your chimney.  Anyone who tells you it’s easy to buy (worthwhile) expired domains is selling you a line of bull.

With the Expired Domain Cartels (in conjunction with shady registrars) playing the game, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single expired domain still available for purchase 3 hours after the drop. If you don’t have some really fancy automated tools running, you’ll waste far more time trying to find an expired domain that is available for registration than any potential benefit you’d receive from the one or two you might find.

So, since the Cartels have many, many registrars doing their bidding for them, your only real chance of getting an expired domain the day it drops is through a backorder house, but as I’ve mentioned, you’ll pay at least 30 dollars up front, plus additional fees once other people bid the price up.  If you’re in love with a particular domain, and you’re prepared to pay upwards of a few hundred dollars for it, then this is your best bet.

Option 2 is to place a backorder with a backorder service that only accepts one backorder per domain name.  Godaddy does it like this (if I place a backorder for business.com today, and you come by and try to place a backorder for business.com tomorrow, the option won’t be available to you.)  The problem here is twofold - since Godaddy only has two registrar account vs hundreds working for the cartels, their chance of getting your domain name for you is slim-to-none. However, if the cartels get it first, and then decide the traffic and profits from holding that domain do not meet their expectations, they’ll get their refund and release it, at which point Godaddy will be able to grab it for you.  Of course, this only happens when the traffic going to the domain sucks

Option 3 - Knowing that the Cartels have already used the system to cherry-pick the best expired domains is a lot like buying packs of baseball cards from a store that opens each pack first and removes the good cards for themselves.  Sure, your getting baseball cards, but the only way you’re going to get a good one is if the store owner has accidentally overlooked a good one.  There is a way to get your hands on expired domain names that the Cartels haven’t even touched, and that is to use registrar-based expired domain name auctions, such as Godaddy’s TDNAM.com.  These registrars never allow their domains to expire (and thus, they never get into the hands of the Cartels.)  Instead, when a domain registered with Godaddy is about to expire, Godaddy pays for an extension on the domain, and puts it in their own name.  Then, they put them up for auction on TDNAM.  Each day, 1000-2000 domains that have never been touched by the Cartels pass through Godaddy’s system.

How do I know that the Cartels don’t touch them?  Because in order to test the traffic that these domains get, they would have to actually buy the domain names from Godaddy.  Why do that when there are so many expired domains that they can utilize that cost them nothing unless the traffic is good?  (Remember, the Cartels are working in conjunction with numerous registrars to take advantage of the 5-day refund policy.)

Utilizing a registrar’s auction system ensures that you at least have a chance to get an expired domain name with good traffic.  It appears that Godaddy doesn’t run extensive of tests on their expired domains up for auction in order to keep the best ones for themselves, as I have been able to find a number of gems over the past few weeks (including some with a PageRank of 5.)

As I wrote this article, I was running the first 500 or so domains at TDNAM through a research tool I created, and there are 28 domains there with PR - one with a PR 5, three with PR4, five with PR3… the rest are PR2 and PR1.  And this is just the first 500 domains.  There are 68,000 more that I haven’t checked yet…
There is, however, a catch (isn’t there always?) - once you win the domain name from TDNAM, you’ve got to wait 2 weeks to actually get control of it (is this to further ensure the cartels stay away?  Or is it their way of getting an extra 2 weeks of Adsense revenue off the domain?)  To put it mildly, this sucks.  When you find a nice, beautiful PR 5 domain, with lots of existing backlinks, you want to MONETIZE, baby!  Instead, you get to sit around with your thumb in your butt while Godaddy monetizes a domain that you’ve already paid them for.

Which brings me to the title of this part of the series - can the little guy profit from expired domain names?  Yes, provisionally.  Here are the provisions:

• You must have some sort of automated system in place to check every domain’s PR, backlinks, and indexed pages in all the major search engines.  Checking domains individually would be a huge time sink, and would result in vastly dimishing returns.  Whether this a program that you run on your own, or a service that you subscribe to doesn’t matter.  You can’t waste your time doing expired domain research.
• Using the data from that automated system, you need to be able to evaluate the domains with good stats, and attempt to estimate how you’d be able to monetize that domain, and to what extent.  This will give you a good indication of what you should pay for said domain name.  If you can’t make money online without expired domain names, then you’re not going to make money with expired domain names.
• If at all possible, stick to expired domain auctions run by registrars (Enom, Godaddy, etc) - these domains are never released into the public, the cartels never get their hands on them, so you are at least afforded a chance to get a domain with existing (good) traffic.

If you don’t have access to some sort of automated system for evaluating expired domains, and if you’re not in a position to quickly and effectively monetize any expired domains that you get ahold of, then my recommendation would be to stay away from the expired domain game.

However, if you have the tools, and you’re able to knock out a website that you know will earn money quickly, then using expired domain names can be a valuable addition to your internet marketing bag-of-tricks.

Until the current situation changes (until ICANN stops allowing frivolous domain refunds, and starts pulling registrar accounts from the biggest offenders), dabbling in expired domains is not a game for the novice internet marketer, because the time and the money that you spend trying to play the game would be much better spent enhancing your internet marketing education.