There are some Internet Marketing courses floating around that advise you to register an exact match domain name for trademarked products to promote those products. There are numerous reasons why this is a bad idea.

The number one reason why it is a bad idea is that using a company’s trademark can get you into trouble with the company that owns the trademark. They can send a cease and desist through their legal department, they can sue you for big money or they can file a UDRP to get the domain from you.

Of course, there are legal uses for trademarked domains, but you would need to hire a trademark attorney to determine that for you to avoid trouble. There’s parody and fair use, but most of the time, your use will not fall under either one of these if you plan to use it for commercial use.

One place on the Net to check for US Trademarks is TESS. You can check for international trademarks here. It’s still a good idea to get a trademark attorney to search for you, especially if you are creating a long-term brand and want to be absolutely sure there are no trademarks on the name you choose, but these two sites are good for a quick check for trademarks.

There are occasions when a company that owns a trademark will allow you to use their trademark. It never hurts to contact the company and ask them for permission and get it in writing if they allow it. It’s the quickest and safest way to find out if using a trademark will be safe.

Another reason not to use trademarks in domains is that quite a few affiliate programs, like Amazon for instance, does not allow you to promote their products with trademark domains. They will close your account right up if you use one.

There are other types of trademark infringement that are also a bad idea. One of those is called Cybersquatting.

Wikipedia: Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

This not only includes a company brand name, but can include celebrities names and typo domains where the misspelled domain is very close to a trademark.

One thing I hear frequently in forums is “there’s a million domains registered with iPad in it.” Don’t take that for permission to use Apple’s or anyone else’s trademark. They’ll get around to you sooner or later. Most companies that have gone to the trouble of registering and getting a trademark, are going to do what they need to do to protect that trademark, so don’t be stupid. Either hire a trademark attorney or just don’t register trademarked domain names.

PageRank: Wikipedia: Principles of PageRank

A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the graph, the webgraph, created by all World Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, taking into consideration authority hubs such as cnn.com or usa.gov. The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

There are a lot of forums and domain selling sites that are offering high PageRank domains for sale, but are they really high PageRank? There is a loophole in Google’s algorithm that scammers can game to make it appear that any domain has a high PageRank. These scammers simply redirect the domain with a 301 redirect to a high PageRank site and the redirected domain will pick up PageRank of the site that it is redirected to. There are numerous ways to do this. Some use cloaking to redirect it only when a Googlebot visits the site and some simply use a 301 redirect.

They then remove the redirect just prior to putting it up for sale. The unsuspecting buyer purchases a domain that he thinks has high PageRank and will give him a boost in the serps. The scammer could also be faking the PageRank in order to sell links on “high PageRank” sites.

Digitial Point forums has a domain selling section of their marketplace with quite a few “high PageRank” domains for sale. Take for example, this one: betsafesverige.com on this page http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2375739. I ran this one through a rank checker at http://www.rankchecker.com. See in the screenshot below that it says the PageRank is valid. However, there are ZERO backlinks to the site in any of the search engines, the Alexa rating is very high, it’s not listed in DMOZ, and it has only one parked page listed in Google. The person who buys this domain will have a ZERO PageRank on their hands by the next time Google’s PageRank changes.

Here’s another interesting Digital Point forums scammer selling a fake PageRank domain, http://www.coolestaudiobooks.com/ at this listing: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2373472. Take a look at the blog below with one post, Hello World.

This little gem allegedly has a PageRank 6. All that and ZERO backlinks anywhere, one Hello World post, Alexa rating through the roof, not listed in DMOZ or Yahoo. It’s not rocket science. If this site is really a PageRank 6, then PageRank is truly meaningless. Checked it at a PageRank Checker here, and you can see it says the PageRank is valid. Another interesting thing about this domain, when you search for the domain in Google using site:coolestaudiobooks.com, and then click on the Cache, you get a 404 Not Found error. Previously, one way to tell if a domain had fake PageRank was to check the Google cache and the cache would be the real site with the PageRank that the domain had been redirected to. That can’t be relied on as a way to check for fake PageRank, since this one has no cache and the one above this one is showing the correct domain in the cache. I can only assume that these scammers have found a way to get around the Google cache thing.

There are a ton more for sale on Digital Point that are highly suspicious. Exercise extreme caution when buying a domain from there with PageRank or anywhere else for that matter. Before I was aware of the fake PageRank scams out there, I bought one on Flippa that was fake and the PageRank rapidly disappeared after I bought the domain.

Before buying a domain that allegedly has PageRank, check it here and use whatever your favorite tools are to check for backlinks. If, like the site above, it has one Hello World post in a blog, and no backlinks, I would advise you not to buy that domain. If it has just one parked page and no backlinks, same thing. PageRank is assigned to pages, not domains and if that domain has no real pages (just a parked page or Hello World post), common sense will tell you that the PageRank is fake.

How Important is PageRank?

PageRank played a much larger role when Google was first launched than it does today. When Google was launched, there were just a few dozen ranking factors that were considered in Google’s algorithm, so each one carried more weight than they do today. Today there are over 200 ranking factors considered when ranking websites, so each ranking factors carries a lot less weight than they did previously.

A lot of my customers and other newbies do not know how to ftp files to their server. This is a skill that anyone who owns domain names should acquire. It may seem complicated at first, but once you learn it, it really isn’t and you will then be able to upload a website or single files to a domain. This is a valuable skill to have if you have a lot of domains that you plan to develop.

It’s very simple to get a WordPress blog installed on a domain, using Fantastico in your Cpanel hosting interface, but if you want to upload a sales letter or minisite, you must use ftp to upload the files to the root directory of the domain.

I use Filezilla for uploading. You can find a detailed Filezilla tutorial here: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/ftp/filezilla.htm.

The complete tutorial on uploading files using Filezilla and other ftp clients can be found here: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/ftp/.

There are two good methods that I use to find end users for my domains. One is a slightly better way than the other, but takes just a little bit more effort.

The first one is to Google the keywords in your domain. In the Google results you get, you’ll get a lot of companies with similar domain names as yours, or at least using tags with those keywords. Gather up contact emails either from Whois or from the contact info on the sites of the Advertisers in the right hand column of the Google results. These are the people that you will be sending an email to.

It’s important not to spam these people. Send an individual email to each of them, simply telling them that you have xxxxxx.com available for acquisition and you’re offering it to companies that may benefit from the domain.
Here is a sample letter that I use. It is the basics. You need to add any additional benefits that this domain would have for this company.

Hi,

I am the owner of xxxxxx.com, an excellent domain name that is highly relevant to your business. I am going to list it on Sedo.com for sale, but thought I would offer it to a few select businesses that might have an interest in this domain. Since your company is in the xxx business and this domain contains keywords that are highly relevant to your company, this domain seems like a perfect match for your company.

The keywords, xxxxxxx, have approximately xxxxx searches in Google per month, and with a domain that contains these keywords exactly, it should be easy to get to page one of Google results for those keywords.

I understand that you already have a website and domain name, however this domain would be an excellent additional domain to drive highly targeted traffic to your main site. I am now taking offers on this domain before listing it on Sedo. Please contact me if you are interested in this domain.

Regards
First Name, Last Name
Email
Phone Number

Adding your phone number gives you more credibility and some will call you to discuss the domain name.

The next method is pretty much the same as the first method, only this time, you Google the keywords and make a list of the competitors in the right hand column of the search results.

Then you build a quick and basic WordPress blog, and as the first post, you list all of those competitors on the page with their contact info, just like a business directory listing.

Make the title the exact same thing as the keywords. Do some social bookmarking and create some backlinks to it and within no time at all, you should be able to hit the first page of Google for those keywords. That is the goal. To get the site listed on the front page of Google.

You then contact all of the competitors listed on the site with the url of the site and show them that the site is listed on the first page of Google for those keywords. Just add that to the basic letter above.

This method works much better than the first method because they can see the listing on the first page of Google and they can see all their competitors on that site. They sure don’t want their competitors to get the site and be on the front page of Google. It gives them a great incentive to buy the domain and site.

One of the easiest and best ways to do so is to make money flipping domains.

The benefits of flipping domains:

• A website isn’t necessary if the domain is valuable.
• Can be a quicker method of making money online than most other
• methods of making money online.
• You’re paid through Paypal for most transactions… meaning instant cash!
• Domains can make you money. Some of the top domains (one word high quality domains) have sold for millions of dollars. You can buy premium domains that sell for hundreds for as little as $18 each here.

Of course, it’s unlikely you’ll find a domain today that is worth millions unless you buy one yourself. You’ll need a lot of capital to do that. However, you can find decent quality domains that are available to be freshly registered. This is where you can make a lot of money. Some brand new domains may even go for $100 or more than that if you know how to pick them.

Right now I’m making around $500 -$2,000 per month selling simple domains with no content on them. This is with little effort. If you put in the effort you can make more than I do.

Where to register your domains

There are a lot of different registrars to register domain names. I use Godaddy, Fabulous, Moniker and Namecheap.com. You can register free at all of them and then you are set up to register domains there or to have domains pushed to you from other users when you buy one. That’s why it’s good to have more than one account, but you can always set that up as needed and just choose one to begin with.

Checking Domain availability

There are plenty of rumors around that doing a domain search at some registrars can cost you a great domain, if you don’t register it right away. I don’t how much truth there is behind it, but I always do my domain searches at Namecheap and I always purchase my domain as soon as I find the one I want. There are just too many people searching for domains to risk losing it by not registering it right away.

Cross Forum Selling

Sign up to some of the places for sale listed below and check to see if there are any bargains. You’ll often find domains going for cheap or you being able to work a bargain because there’s no interest on that specific forum or the buyer wants to sell it quick / needs the money.

Try and minimize the risk… look for domains for sale that are decent (obviously), but cost less than around $10 -$30 and have at least six months to run. This way, if you can’t sell them immediately you can always develop them or try again in a month or two.

You should look for around 3-5 per week, and once you build up some capital look for more. Remember, even if you only make a few dollars profit per domain, it add up… $10 profit allows you to buy another domain and if you sell that for $10 profit… you get the idea. Of course, you can buy as many domains as you want. But they aren’t any use unless you sell them.

Where To Sell

You will make more money by selling your domains to actually end users, but first I’ll tell you about the places where you can list them for sale.

Here are some of the places you can sell your domains:

Forums.Digitalpoint.com

This forum has a lot of traffic and the best thing is that it is free to list at. The domains section is at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=59 You need an account which is at least two weeks old and has 25 posts to list there. People on Digital Point tend to expect and offer very low prices.

Namepros.com – www.namepros.com Namepros  is a forum specifically for domaining. You can list your domains for free in the Domain Auctions threads, Fixed Priced Domains thread or Make an Offer Domains thread. Make sure you read the rules for each section before you post. . Basically, you’ll be selling for reseller prices on Namepros, rather than end user pricing.

This is a great forum for domainers. In addition to being able to sell your domains, and even websites, there is a lot of information on all aspects of domaining. Check it out and you might learn a lot.

Flippa

Flippa is better than the two above because it’s visited by a more serious buyers. On Digital Point, you’ll often find that people tend to be very cheap.

On Namepros, people know how to appreciate a good domain, but what I’ve found is that it’s less well known than Flippa so sometimes your auction can be ignored or go for less money that it should do.

When you create your listing at Flippa, list your domain in the title (or subtitle) because there are quite a few threads and buyers don’t have the time/energy to look at all of them.

The good thing Flippa is that even though it costs money ($19 to list), you can list multiple domains at once. So once you get a bit of capital flipping on free forums like Digital Point / Namepros, you can list 5-20 domains at a time in this section and you’ll find that a reasonable number of them will sell if you stick to the formula I gave you. Those three sites should be enough to sell most reasonable quality domains. You can list your domain as an auction or with a fixed price – it’s up to you.

Other good webmaster forums where you can sell are:
http://www.talkfreelance.com http: // www.v7n.com http://www.talkfreelance.com

You can also sell your domains at sedo.com and afternic.com. There’s an annual fee to list at afternic, but sedo is free. I have quite a few listed at Sedo. This is a very passive way to sell your domains. They can bring in a good price at Sedo, if you’re willing to wait for the offer. Basically, you list them and forget about it until you have an offer. When you have an offer, you can send it to auction or accept the offer or counter the offer. If you accept the offer, a Sedo rep will handle the entire transaction, so it is completely safe. You give Sedo the domain and the buyer gives Sedo the money. Once transfers are complete, Sedo puts the money in your Paypal account.

When listing your domains on the forums, make sure you have a catchy title mentioning the facts.

Example listing:
ABCD.com – Great Short and Brandable Domain Starting At $9!

ABCD.COM is a short domain that you can use for many purposes. For example,
it could be used for a music blog or even to sell a music product.

The keyword ABCD has over 5,000 searches per month (see Google Adwords
tool). Starting bid: $9

Reserve: Yes BIN: $50 Auction ends: 24 hours from last bid

Payment through Paypal. The domain is located at GoDaddy which means it is a
free push to your account.
Buy this today because it won’t last long!
/example

The BIN is the buy it now – the price you’ll take for an instant sale. Starting bid is the bid that buyers can start bidding from. You’ll usually want to make this more than the cost of your domain, however you can start bidding at $1 if you want to draw more people to your sale thread.

The reserve is a price that must be passed for the domain to sell. Having a reserve is safer because (for example) if you start an auction at $1 and only a few people bid, you’d be forced to sell at a loss. Having a hidden reserve makes sure this will not happen.

Make sure you mention when the auction will end – a good way to keep it going is to use a “x hours after last bid” function where the thread will get bumped every time a bid is made. The more people that see your auction, the more likely it is your domain will sell.

The above format is for an auction type domain sale. If you’re listing on Flippa, just list domains, prices and the way you take payment (Paypal). If you have search data for the domains you can also add that. Any info you have to sell the domains, the easier it is to sell them.

Generally, try to put prices at 25% higher than you actually feel the domain is worth (so if you want to sell for $40, list the price as $50) but also state you’re open for negotiation. You’ll find that most buyers will pay the 25% extra anyway and even if they negotiate, it will be to the price you wanted originally.

Get started – the best thing about this is that you can get started today.

Don’t waste your time; get going immediately.  Look for a domain that you can sell today for Paypal cash!

Are You a Domain Junkie?

I am. I just found this fantastic opportunity to be a domain flipper and to have access to over 500 premium domain names to sell without taking on the risk of buying all those domains yourself.

It’s called the Domain Profits Club and here’s the deal.  They set you up with the website that automatically displays the domains that are available to sell.

You Keep 100% PROFIT on Every Domain Name You Sell From this $250,000.00 Portfolio,

And YOU Decide the Price.

When you receive an offer by email, you can accept it or refuse it and keep 100% of the profits when you sell. Here’s an example of this fully stocked, ready to profit domain flipping website that you get: Diva Domains.

How Much Does it Cost?

You can pay just $37/month for membership and you get the website along with it and access to all of the domains… and these aren’t just ordinary domains. These are truly premium domain names. If you want to buy one for a client, the cost is $18 (domain name registration cost plus research cost). That’s it. Just $18 to purchase any of the domains, and these domains are worth hundreds. You can even buy the domains for yourself … keep it and use it on your own sites. You don’t have to sell it if you don’t want to. It’s worth the membership cost just to have access to buying premium domains at $18 each, much less having access to them to sell them for many times the price of the domain.

This is the closest thing I’ve ever found to an “instant domain flipping business” … The beauty is that you get to sell excellent domains without the risk of investing a lot of money in domains yourself.  Just upload the website and start promoting. You don’t need to buy any of them until you have a sale, and if you do buy a bunch of them to make sure they are available to you to sell, you have a week to make a decision to keep them or return them for refund. How can you possibly lose with this?

The Domains on Your Website are

Automatically Updated 24 Hours a Day

You can even add other domains that you own to the site, but it’s not necessary.  No webmaster skills required.  This site runs on autopilot. Site installation is so easy …. even a caveman could do it. 

How Do I Sell These Domains?

I’ve just written this ebook on everything you need to know about domaining.  This ebook tells you where to sell, who to sell to and how to sell.  Best news of all …

IT IS FREE.

You will also get a free bonus ebook I wrote called Niche Overdrive.

Download both free ebooks here.

Check out the Domain Profits Club and see for yourself what a deal it is.  Seriously, this is too good to pass up.

In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

With the current state of the economy here in the US some of you might wonder if domaining is still a viable means of online income.  Here’s my experience.  I have a lot of domain names just sitting parked right now, but one by one, I am developing them.  I choose the best, most interesting names, develop a site, get it indexed, get some traffic and sell them at a nice profit.  All this, of course, takes work.  So many people want to just buy a domain name and sell it at a huge profit without doing anything to it.  That works for some really high-powered domain names, but for the average portfolio, it doesn’t … at least not for me.

Even if you don’t want to develop, in order to get more than reseller profit from a domain name, it’s going to take work.  In order to make a real profit from a domain name, you need to sell it to an end-user rather than a reseller.  Finding and contacting those end users takes time and work.  I’ve done it both ways … finding end users and developing.  I enjoy developing more than cold calling (via email) end users.

There’s a trend to develop mini-sites rather than park a domain.  That’s a good start, or at least a better alternative to parking sites, but I develop full sites rather than mini-sites.  It’s all about the end user.  As an end user myself, someone who purchases sites, I never throw money at “made for Adsense” mini-sites.  Number one reason is that I could throw that up in no time myself.  Number two reason, I don’t find them fun or appealing in any way.  If they make you some money … good, but people pay pretty well, even in this economy, for a well-developed and designed site in a hot niche.

Here’s some sites I’ve sold recently:

Land of Shopportunity
Anime Zoo
Dot Com Mogul

Here’s some I have in development:

eMovieTrailer
Simple Yoga

That’s just a few of them. I have more in different stages of development. Once they are developed, I get them indexed and get traffic going to them. How do I do that? Simple. I own Firestorm Forum, a social bookmarking exchange community and when I exchange bookmarks, let’s say Stumbles (that works best for me), the site is indexed within 48 hrs .. usually 24 and has great traffic stats immediately (unless, of course, the site is a real dog). It works beautifully and having the site well-indexed in Google and traffic stats to show off adds a great deal of value to the site and gives you some selling points for listing.

Where to sell?

I have my best luck selling on Sitepoint. It costs money but has been well worth it for me. One tip for selling a site on Sitepoint is to make a great sales page. Be sure to mention all of the assets of the site … how many posts, how much traffic, revenue if any, site features, potential to make money (ie … do you already have Adsense and ads in place?). Here’s one of my listings to give you an example of listing the site’s selling points.

One thing about developing nice sites to sell … you can even flip a weak domain name if you have a great site established on it … not a really crappy domain name … just a bit weak. Of course, if the site is really great, it might even sell to someone who purchases a better domain name for it.

What kind of sites to develop?

I have two favorites … WordPress blogs and Joomla sites. Many people know how to set up a WordPress blog, so that is probably the easiest site to get established. Joomla sites are a bit more complex and often the best components to add features to your site are commercial, so you have to sink a little money into the site. To tell you the truth, 6 weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to put a nice Joomla site together to save my life. Then I bought one really cheap and had to buckle down and get to know Joomla in order to add value to the site and fix some problems. It didn’t take long to become a Joomla enthusiast and all in all, it was a pretty short learning curve.

So that’s it …my advice for selling domains in a bad economy. Works well for me. Hope it does for you as well.