Domain Flipping Experiment

Hello NetKnuckleHeaders!

Today, I am going to show you my latest money-making experiment. This experiment involves flipping domains. Yes, you heard right – flipping domains.

You’re probably thinking, “Has he lost his mind? Domain flipping is SOOOO 90s-ish”. And yeah the days of buying a catchy domain name and reselling it to some company for an outlandish profit are indeed gone. But this one is a little different.

This method is based on Gene Pimentel’s “Domain Flipping Success” report but I varied just a little from it. Here is what I did:

Step 1.

Think of a service-type of business. For example, dentist, florist, doctor, etc. For my experiment, I chose “divorce lawyer”. I thought it might be better to zero in on a particular type of attorney instead of the broader “lawyer” or “attorney” category.

Step 2.

Choose a city you want to target. I chose “Minneapolis” for my experiment since I am familiar with that particular area.

Step 3.

Use Google Suggest to find out how many searches are being perfomed on your phrase. For example, I was thinking about targeting the phrase “divorce lawyer minneapolis”. I started typing that into Google and got the following results:

Step 4.

Okay, this is looking really good so far – 972,000 results. Next, I wanted to find a domain name that matched my keywords EXACTLY.  Matching the domain name to the exact keywords is critical. I then went over to the Name.com website to see if the domain DIVORCELAWYERMINNEAPOLIS was available. (Important Note – DO NOT use Godaddy to check the availability of your domain names unless you plan on registering them immediately. It has been reported that Godaddy will take any domain names that are searched for but not registered.)

In the screenshot below, you can see the .COM and the .NET domain names are taken.

At this point, I had to go back to step 3 and modify my search phrase since the DIVORCELAWYERMINNEAPOLIS domain name was not available. I decided to try “Best Divorce Lawyer in Minnesota”. Google Suggest showed that phrase searched for 331,000 per month.

That’s a decent amount of traffic so I went back to NAME.COM and searched for “BestDivorceLaywerInMinnesota.com”. That domain name was available along with the same name without the word “In” (BestDivorceLawyerMinnesota.com).

I then went over to Godaddy and registered both domains.

Step 5.

After registering the domains, I created the two new accounts on my Hostgator reseller account. Then, I used Cpanel and Fantastico to install a WordPress blog on each domain. Make sure to name your blog the same name as your keyword phrase. For example: “Best Divorce Lawyer in Minnesota”. Use the same phrase in the blog tagline. You DO NOT need to change the blog’s theme. You certainly can if you want but you don’t need to. Remember – you are selling a domain name, not a website.

Step 6.

I made one post to my blog. I made sure the subject of the post was the same name as my keyword phrase. The content for my post came from the paid search results located on the top and right-hand side of the Google search results. The content consisted of the people I will be contacting later on. (See example below)

Step 7.

I updated my blog’s theme to include a ‘for sale’ message with contact information. See the screenshot above.

Step 8.

Here is the really amazing part – within a few days, my site was ranked # 1 for my keyword phrase in Google. I couldn’t believe it at first but trust me, it does work. However, even if you don’t get the # 1 ranking, you should still end up on the first page.

Step 9.

After my site was ranked by Google, I was now ready to start sending emails to prospective buyers. Remember the list of sites I included on my blog post? I visited all those sites and collected email addresses from their ‘Contact Us’ pages.

Step 10.

After gathering all the email addresses of my contacts, I created an email template to use. When and if it made sense to do so, I personalized / customized it to fit the person or company.  I then distributed my emails to them. Be sure to include your contact information at the end of the email. Include your email address and phone number.

Although I have not received any offers as of this writing (3/27), I feel fairly confident this method could generate some money. I paid roughly $15.00 for the two domains so I’d consider any offers above that. However, I am hoping for an offer in the $250-$500 range. The total effort of this experiment was maybe 2-3 hours so this isn’t very time-consuming.

Let me know if you have any questions. I can be reached at:

Support [AT] NetKnuckleHead.com

Thanks and good luck!

The NetKnuckleHead