Domain Drop Catchers

Last week I decided to educate myself on how to pick up expired domains.

Up until this time I have had domain drop catchers coming to me with the domains they have found and I would pay from $150 to $500 per domain. For the most part the domains I have purchased had Pagerank and a website with them.

Through this process I have picked up about 125 domains while the other domains I have in my 200 or so domain propholie I have purchased directly. A lot of these domains were probley not a good purchase and I havn’t done a lot with them but the plan is to make some changes there.

Canadian Directories:

Another thing that inspired me to look into domain catching was that as I was compiling a list of Canadian Directories I ended up purchased 3 Canadian directory domains. I will be retrieving the old Websites from the Way Back Machine for these directory and putting them up.

My Entry Into Domain Drop Catching:

I started out at NameJet and took their Pre-Prelease list of about 400,000 expired domain names. I used NotePad++ to parse out the domains from the list that contained the key words in the domain name that would identify the type of a website that would be on the domain.

I came up with 26 prospective domains that had Pagerage. I dropped the domains that only had PR1 or had a domain name I didn’t like and was left with 12.

Two of these domains were taken out of expiring and they ended up for sale on domain reseller SEDO with a minimum bid of $650USD and $1350USD. This gives you a bit of an idea of the value of the domains I am looking at.

I did up a post at the NamePros Domain Forum where people buy, sell, and discuss domain names. You have to register on this forum to be able read messages but here is my post which ended up getting 25 messages and 264 views in a couple of days.

This forum also has online chat room where I have checked in a number of times trying to find someone that has some good experience that I can bounce questions off of.

Good Articles:

Here are some good articles that I have read over to educate myself.

–Get the drop on expiring domains
–My “how to guide” on drop catching expired domains
–How To Snatch An Expiring Domain
–Inside a Drop Catcher’s War Room
–Drop Catchers Reviews
–Backordering Expired Domain Names

Domain Diagrams:

The main players in the domain drop are NameJet, SnapNames, and Pool.

Some Tools To Help You Out:

–Domain Text Clearner
–Fake Pagerank Detector
–Domain Drop Tools
–Google Ban Checker

Domain Blogs:

–Domain After Life
–Dot Weekly

Review Of Domain Finding Services:

I signed up for a 3 day membership for $9.95 at Click Mojo and checked to see what they should show for the themed domains I was looking for.

Out of the 26 domains I found by just searching the expired domain list clickmojo showed me none of them. I searched in the pending delete, namejet, snapnames, the scanner was down (I’ve had to remove the keywords and phrases filter because the data was corrupt and showing inaccurate results).

So unless the scanner is going to show me these domains this produce was useless. I couldn’t even find the domains I found by hand.

The next service I looked at was the Drop Day which is a free service. This program also failed to find any of the 26 domains I found by hand but it found 2 domains of interest that I had not found.

I added one of these to my list and the other one I didn’t like its name and it only had a PR1.

The next service I checked out was Register Compass which is $37 a month but offers a refund on the first month if you don’t do more than 24 searches.

They have a fashing warning on there site that the prices are about to go up so you better all hurry over now and sign up fast.

On this service I found one domain but I didn’t like but I will keep an eye on it and see what it goes for. So a this point all these 3 services were basically useless to me as they didn’t even find the domains that I found by hand.

I plan on running a series of articles on drop catching and posting how things when with the 13 domains I am now watching.