The DomainFace Blog

In the first two posts we covered a bit of background and the “why?” part of buying aged domains to renovate. Today is about the “how”, well the how I do it anyway.

The “how” is the fun part. When I’m looking for aged domains to renovate, I know that any suitable domains I find will fall into one of two categories. Anything with a PR up to 4 tends to be fair game for renovating, and anything with a PR5 or higher becomes my new ‘special friend’ and I court these domains a little differently. They get the good cheese and the corked wine  instead of the screw top variety.

The higher PR sites are perfect for using in your own network and come in very handy for building links to the sites you are renovating, but more of that later.

I’m all for getting from A to B the fastest way possible and I love using tools that get me the results I’m after quickly and with the minimum of fuss. Finding aged domains does require time and effort (hey, pushing the search button is effort).

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are a number of ways to do this and I’m simply sharing the way I do things. My weapon of choice is Market Samurai combined with Domain Face.

Being a child of ‘the thirty day challenge’ generation, I was weened on Market Samurai  as my default market research tool and now with the domain face module, it’s my number one way to find aged domains.

When I’m looking for aged domains to renovate, as opposed to targeted keyword research for a specific market, I employ a throw a heap of mud at the wall and see what sticks approach. I keep a journal of keywords that I’m constantly adding to all day long and I set aside  45min a day to punch a heap of them into market samurai and see what comes up.

I’m constantly amazed at what comes up with this approach. You see, it really is all about just sitting in the chair, setting the timer and just doing it, nike style.

When I’m looking for aged domains to renovate I don’t really care what niche they are in. Well, to a point. I’ll stay away from markets that don’t align with my world view, such as Porn, Viagra and little fluffy white dogs. I hate little fluffy white dogs.

What I’m looking for is a balance of age, PR and back-links. Domain face is great at detecting faked PR, which makes life easier. The final filter I apply is to check that the market is not too competitive, as I do want the site to rank well. Again, I use market samurai for keyword and competition research.

PR is the first think I look for. The higher the better. PR is google’s way of telling the Internet that the cool sites in your market think your site is kida cool too. I always look for at least a PR of 2 and filter my search results around PR.

The next thing I like to see are back-links. The more the better. Back-links are the drummers of your websites. The engine room and the driving force that pushes you up the search engine rankings. Aged domains with lots of back-links make the job of ranking the site a whole lot easier.

Third but not least, is domain age. All things being equal, age makes all the difference as the one thing you can’t manipulate and make happen other than one day at a time is age.

If two sites are competing for a position and are similarly matched with back-links and PR, age will determine who comes out on top. I also find that building  lots of back-links and high PR takes time, so most domains  scoring well with both, will come well aged anyway.   When it comes time to sell, age gives your site great street cred. You’re not the Johnny come lately, standing on then corner hustling. With an aged domain, you are the wise old grey bearded grandfather everyone comes to for sage advice.

The next think I like to do is the check out the domain’s history in the wayback machine over at www.archive.org Here you can see a history of the kind of content the domain  has  carried in its past life. It gives you a feel of what the site was about and what  you need to do to bring it back to life, as to preserve then links that your domain comes with, you’re going to have to recreate a lot of the old content. Notice I didn’t say copy. You only own the domain and not the website or any of the content that once populated it.

When I’m happy that a potential domain ticks all the boxes I click on the link inside market samurai that takes me to the auction site for that particular domain. The domain hosting registrars are wise to the value of expiring aged domains and as a resulst nearly all now go to auction.

The auction process is pretty straight forward and most are very similar to buying on EBay and the like. The secret to picking up aged domains cheaply is to hold off any bidding till the last minute. The $10 sites I pick up, more often then not are auctions that have slipped through the cracks and I was the only bidder and at the eleventh hour, or due the fact that I  live in Australia and most registrars are in the states, it’s more like 4:00 am! To get the best price, you really do need to hold of bidding for as long as possible and avoid any bidding wars.

When you first start this, it will seem like every domain goes into an auction with a ton of bids and a hefty price tag and that the guy that told you on that blog about the $10 domains is full of crap! It is getting harder and harder to find great aged domains for $10, but they do exist and I’m happy to pay up to $100 for a domain that I know I can renovate and sell for over $1,000.

When you look at in terms of return on investment, it’s nothing to be sneezed at. Try getting that sort of return in a few months with a bank theses days.

Once you win the domain at auction,  you receive notification that it’s yours and you become the new proud registered owner of a healthy  bouncing aged domain. It’s cigars all round!

The first step in taking the next step is to leave the domain on the registrar that you bought it from. You can host the website where ever you want, but to make sure you keep all the good stuff, like PR and back-links, it’s crucial that you leave it where it is.

In the next post, I’ll talk to you about what I do to put a website on the newly acquired domain and the steps I take to keep the site’s PR, back-links and start to turn it into a site we can sell in a few months time.

talk soon,

Danny