In this competitive Marketplace it is getting harder and harder to find good quality domain names that are available for purchase. On the other hand there are some really really good ones just sitting around gathering dust in some domain investors portfolio and sometimes these forgotten domains slip through the cracks and don’t get renewed and are supposed to drop back in the pool available to the general public to register..
Even in the pool though there is a lot of interest in these domains so you are more likely than not to need to use a backorder service to back order these domains. They typically will charge you around $70 for the service.
So then it goes something like this…
- Find a domain you like
- Place a backorder
- Hope one of your backorder services manages to grab the domain
- Everyone who backordered the domain through that particular provider gets a chance to bid on it
- The winner pays the highest bid and gains registration for the domain
- Or, if there are no other bidders, the registration completes for the basic $60-$70 fee
There are many companies out there that offer domain backordering service’s the most popular being:
Buyer beware just because you use one of these backordering services it does by no means guarantee that you will successfully win the dropped domain you selected, if there is a lot of interest in the domain name it will go to a private auction and there are no fixed rules in place at this time so you may not even be able to get into the auction to bid.
Ok so we have established backordering and bidding on dropped and expired domains does not always guarantee success and can be a frustrating process so you may wish to consider alternatives to securing your desired domain name.
One option is to find out who finds the domain name you want and try to negotiate with the owner directly yourself. If you are not comfortable negotiating directly yourself you could always hire a broker but this will cost you.
The upside of this is that you might be able to make a reasonable offer for a domain that isn’t doing much beside collecting dust. The risk, of course, is that you’ll remind the owner how much their domain is worth and they’ll take it straight to a public auction on their own. These public auctions might even end up selling domains at a higher price than the private ones do.
An alternative is to find smaller public auctions that are already running, SnapNames, Enom, and Godaddy have public auctions for previously registered domains, so if you are willinging to spend a bit of time sifting through the weaker domain names in these auctions you may find something which could become of value to you. I have said this before but more and more we are seeing brands popping up everywhere with very generic domain names that are not tied to a specific technology or product and should stand the test of time.
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