I started my domaining career as a flipper but have grown into a "holder" and am able to sell now when I wish. The other day I was thinking about some of my domains I had flipped and what they would do if I still had them….

Well, it doesn’t matter now, because they brought me to what I am today. My old form of flipping was eBay as I’m sure many others that flip do or did the same. I would sell some domains on the domain forums as well (not many). My main source after about a year of flipping was a super valuable Email List of domain buyers I had built up in the year.

Everytime that I sold a domain name, I would keep the email address of the buyer. I currently have a list of 1,000+ known domain name buyers now and that became my main tool for flipping. I would set the prices low and sell, take my profit and buy more domains and keep repeating daily. I was flipping 10-30 domain names a day. This would build my cash flow and then I was able to buy more expensive domains at SnapNames, eNom club drop and TDNAM.

One of the hardest things was keeping Stock. I didn’t want to just buy, because I needed more domains to sell, so I knew this process was getting old fast and something needed to change. So I sold a super big chunck all at one and purchased better domain names and my constant quick flipping days was over.

This past week with several of my offers that I got on domain names, happen to be domain names that I still had from around my flipping days. They are about a year old and I paid registration fees for them all. So it appears if you have a decent domain, 7-12 months is a fair range that you could expect to get an offer. All mine turned into $1,xxx offers/sales and I still seem to get an offer a day on some of my old flipping domains that I had kept.

Now there are also ways of bad flipping and also a great deal of risk. In order to do your flips and your listing in auctions, you have to start your price low ($0.99) and intice bidding. You will do good on some and not so good on others. Do not look at each sale… Take all your sales over a two week or even a 1 month period to see how you are doing. Some weeks are better then others, so it should average out.

Purchasing domains on the open market can be another challange. If the price of your domain name is pretty easy to find, since you just purchased it in the open market, the domain should go on the backburner for a bit. If a buyer knows what you just paid for it, it’s going to be a hard flip.

Also, if you are posting domains for sale on domain forums, use this DomainName(.)com so it doesn’t show up in Search Engines very easy. I always type the exact domain name into Google and if there is something writen about it, it’s likely to show up very high in the results. Domain forum posts get ranked very high and very fast.

If you are just starting out, domain flipping is good. You will learn the ropes, but it is very important to buy the BEST domains you can for your money. This will take some work, but will pay off if you do not over think the process. Buy domain names that Make Sense, Hot topics etc. Do not add extra words and then think the domain is Premium. Adding words like The or Web to the start of domains works at times, but doesn’t do the trick. Watch trends on eBay. 4 letter .com’s do well. Catchy and brandable .com’s can do well also.

The bad part of domain flipping is… future profit. People are buying your flipping domains for a reason. Either they think it’s a good deal, or they simply do not know what they are doing or it’s just a good domain and is going for the current value. I think in my flipping days on eBay, the highest domain prices I would get were $300-$500 and that didn’t happen very often. Mainly in the $15-$40 range was the average price. Still making money, but don’t forget your eBay fees, registration cost and Your Time spent.

The faster you can get into the "Holding" of domain names, the better. You will see higher ROI’s and a lot less work. I haven’t listed a domain name on eBay in a long time and am happy I no longer need to. I still flip domains from time to time when I know I can get a good price, due to the amount I purchased the domain. Remember, if you can make a few bucks, and know the buyer can as well, it’s a win-win and I would sell each time, so don’t get greedy when you are flipping.

Jamie Zoch www.DotWeekly.com