You’ve probably heard of flipping houses, but come on. Who can afford a house these days? While real estate investing is out of reach for many people, domain flipping isn’t. 

Domain names, or just ‘domains’ are the addresses of websites across the internet. They’re made up of a brandable section like Atom and an extension like .com. Our domain is Atom.com: it’s the online platform for our brand.

As domains are like addresses they are the real estate of the internet. So it makes perfect sense that they’d be a great digital investment. That’s where domain flipping comes in.

The domain industry is going from strength to strength. From 2018 to 2023, the domain sales industry grew at a rate of 4.6% per year, and appears to be accelerating: in 2023 alone it grew 6.3%. In the United States, $9.5 billion changed hands from domain sales.

So if you want to learn how to buy and sell domain names, you’re in the right place. Let’s take a deep dive into domain flipping.

What is Domain Flipping?

Domain flipping is a domain investing strategy that focuses on buying domain names as cheaply as possible and selling them quickly for a profit. Generally, domain flippers won’t do anything to improve the domain like building backlinks. They look for bargain domain names and then market them to potential buyers.

This can be contrasted with a buy-and-hold strategy which focuses on acquiring strong and brandable domain names that will be worth substantial sums to the right buyer.

Many domain investors employ a balance of both strategies, flipping domains for cash flow while holding onto long-term assets.

Can you still make money buying and selling domain names?

The dot-com boom has been and gone, so you might think you’ve missed the boat for making money on domain names. So can you still make money buying and selling domain names?

Yes, the domain name market is going strong, and there are still ways to find undervalued domains and sell them for profit, but it takes work. You have to understand how to correctly value a domain, pay attention to market and industry trends as well as follow new and emerging TLDs (top-level domains).

If you put the effort in, however, domain flipping can become a viable side hustle or even your main income stream. There are still many benefits to domain flipping:

• Low barriers of entry: Unlike traditional investments like property, it’s easy to get started buying and selling domain names. You can acquire new domain names for as little as $10.
• Limited risk: If you’re cautious, domain flipping carries little risk. You don’t have to invest much more than a few bucks on your first domains.
• Supplementary income: Once you understand how to flip domain names it can provide a source of additional income.

How to Flip Domain Names

A word of warning: domain flipping isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would be making money flipping domains. You’re going to need to invest time and resources, and you’ll probably make some mistakes along the way.

However, if you’re persistent, domain flipping can provide a legitimate income stream. Let’s find out how to buy and sell domain names.

1. Find Domains

Domain flipping starts with building your portfolio: you need to find some domains. Domains can be purchased from a variety of places, including new domains from domain registrars, expired domains at domain auctions, and other owned domains from domain marketplaces or private domain sellers.

New domains are very affordable, and cost between $10 and $60 to register, depending on the extension or TLD. But it’s hard to find valuable new domains unless you’re on the cutting edge of domain trends and new gTLDs.

Expired domains are a popular choice for domain flippers. Domains expire when the current owner no longer wants to use the domain, but isn’t interested in selling it. This means valuable domains can be available at bargain prices: perfect for flipping.

Owned domains are being sold, often by other domain flippers. This means the seller is usually aware of the value of their asset, so it’s harder to find good investments. It’s not impossible, however, and exploring domain marketplaces is worthwhile once you understand how to assess a domain’s value.

There are loads of online tools out there to help you find expired domains, track soon-to-expire domains, and assess the value of these domains. Domain Hunter Gatherer and Spamzilla are two popular choices among seasoned investors. 

2. Assess Domains Value

As with any investing strategy, to make money you have to sell domains for more than you bought them for. 

Let’s say you’re scouring domain auctions, and you’ve found goto.xyz, c69.com, and matching.de for sale. Which do you think will be worth the most?

According to domain sales tracking site NameBio, all these domains sold in February 2024 and goto.xyz topped the pack for $15,000. matching.de sold for $6,508 while c69.com earned the seller $5,000. If you’d seen goto.xyz for sale at auction, would you have bought it?

Many factors influence domain value, and if you want to buy and sell domain names you have to understand them all. At a glance, these include:

• Length: shorter domains are generally more valuable.
• Brandability: could a business build a strong brand around the domain?
• Extension: is it popular and trusted by internet users?
• Keywords: does it include high search volume, industry-specific words?
• Industry trends: does it follow business naming trends, such as ending in -ly or -ify?
• Historical usage: A domain with strong historical SEO and backlinks could be worth more.

To return to our three examples, goto.xyz is a super short four-character domain, comprised of English language words that work well together. On top of that, it features an up-and-coming extension .xyz, which is popular in the blockchain and crypto space.

Matching.de pairs a solid English-language word with a ccTLD — the country code TLD for Germany. It’s an odd pairing, but the strength of the single English word provides value.

Meanwhile, c69.com features the gold-standard extension .com, and it’s a sweet three characters. However, the inclusion of numbers and general lack of meaning hurts the value overall.

We’ll take a deep dive into assessing domain value later, as it’s one of the most important skills to learn for a successful domain flipping career.

3. Register your Domains

Once you’ve found your domains, you must buy and register them. Registering domains is akin to ownership in the domain world, but usually only costs around $10 per year, or more for some new, elite TLDs like .io.

Choose a domain registrar with an intuitive interface and strong security features like 2-factor authentication. It could also expedite your selling process to choose one of the more popular registrars: when it’s time to sell your domain, it will be quicker if the domain transfer takes place internally at one registrar. 

4. Find a Buyer

As you acquire domains for your portfolio, you’re going to want to find buyers for your assets. Domain flipping generally refers to seeking quick sales, rather than a buy-and-hold strategy where you wait for the right buyer or brand to come along.

If you’re in it for the long haul, it’ll be worth building a landing page for your domain that directs buyers to the right place. If you sell your premium domains at Atom.com, we’ll provide an optimized landing page for your domains.

For quick sales, you could choose a domain auction and hope that a bidding war pushes the price up over what you paid for it.

You could also seek out buyers through cold emailing and outreach. Let’s say you’ve purchased SacramentoDentist.com and the domain already has a positive reputation for SEO. By reaching out to dentists in the Sacramento area, you might find the perfect buyer ready to splash out on a high-value domain.

5. Sell Your Domain

Once you’ve found your buyer, it’s time to complete the sale. At this stage, you have to follow a careful, step-by-step process to ensure a safe, secure transaction. Domain hijacking — where you lose control of your domain — is a real risk. Here’s how to proceed with a safe sale.

First, get the buyer to place the funds in escrow. An escrow service is a third-party service that holds the funds in place until the transaction has been completed. This means nobody can back out of the deal after the domain has been transferred. If your buyer refuses to use an escrow service, you should reject the offer entirely.

Secondly, initiate the domain transfer at your domain registrar. This should take under 24 hours if the buyer’s domain registration account is with the same registrar, or up to seven days if the registration is moving to a new registrar.

When you use Atom’s Premium Domain Marketplace to sell your domains, we provide both escrow and managed domain transfer, ensuring every transaction is seamless.

6. Rinse and Repeat

One final step: repeat the process! Reinvest the profits from your first sale in your portfolio, acquire some strong, brandable domains to hold in the long term, and keep researching new industries, TLD news and watching for domain trends. Good luck!

The Best Domain Names for Domain Flipping

The biggest challenge for domain flipping is identifying undervalued domains. Expired domains are watched, hawk-like, by domain investors and domain auctions have a habit of inflating prices: if you’re overpaying for your assets, you’ll be lucky to break even. Here’s how to find the best domain names for domain flipping. 

Brandable Domains:

Brandability has a big impact on the future value of your domains, and once you learn to spot it you can begin to identify undervalued domains. In essence, brandability is the potential value a domain name has to a brand and the ease with which they can use that name to connect to customers and market.

Brandability comes from a combination of a few factors:

• Ease of spelling and pronunciation.
• The emotional resonance of the words involved.
• The connection to brand tone, such as luxury, quirky, or historied.

Colors are often highly brandable and have their own emotional connections. Red is associated with urgency and excitement, green with sustainability and the environment, and blue with trustworthiness. Silver and gold, of course, connect to luxury.

As such, greenbeans.co, redbeans.co, and goldbeans.co might all be valuable to coffee brands with alternative brand positioning.

As a domain investor, you’re on the front line of brands choosing their names. Taking the time to explore how businesses approach brand positioning and naming will pay dividends.

Short Domains:

Length is an important tracker of value in domain names, as indicated by examining the most popular websites in the world. Among the top 10,000 websites, the average domain length is eight characters while among the top 100 websites, it’s six.

Single-word domains or two-word combinations are very popular, and as domains grow longer the brandable aspects and relevant keywords grow more important.

Keyword Domains:

Traditional SEO has it that keyword-stuffed domains, like bestbrightonplumber.com, do well. However, a series of chances to search engine algorithms have limited the value of these domains, but some industry-specific words, when paired with other brandable attributes, can have a big impact on domain value.

Words like “coffee”, “finance”, “analysis”  or “fit” combine well with emotive words to create strong brand names. Knowing which keywords, and which connected industries, offer the most value will help you build a strong portfolio.

Relevance to Trends:

Staying at the cutting edge of business naming trends can help you spot undervalued domains. Once you’re aware that startups like Shopify, Spotify, and Grammarly have popularized the -ify and -ly suffixes, you’ll see the value in Growthly.xzy or Fitnessify.ai.

The market might be past its peak for -ify names, but there’s always a new trend on the horizon. With a resource like Crunchbase, you can track new startups and spot the trends for yourself.

Extension (TLD): 

Domain extension is an important factor for domain value. .com is the gold standard and will always be the most valuable for a given name, while .org and .net have been historically popular. Nowadays, emerging domains such as .io, .ai, and .co have gained popularity while .tech and .biz have some adoption, but haven’t proven themselves.

With over 1600 TLDs, there’s no limit on new domains you could register. But few extensions are worth investing in.

Use History and SEO Attributes:

When buying expired or auctioned domains, the history of usage can have an impact on value. Blacklisted domains might be nearly worthless, while domains with a strong history of backlinks and other SEO attributes will give the new owner a headstart in being noticed by Google and other search engines.

Expert tip: Watch out for blacklisted domains that have been used for spam or cybercrime. These domains will never be indexed by search engines and emails from these domains will be marked as spam. It’s tough getting off a blacklist and it will wipe the value off a strong domain.

Budgeting for Domain Flipping

Domain flipping is an accessible investing strategy: you can begin buying and selling domains with just a few hundred dollars. However, don’t be drawn to cheap, unusual extensions. Even though they’re available to register for under $10 each, they’re unlikely to be worth anything.

Instead, start with an investment of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. Do your research before buying a domain, and, eventually, you’ll know where to invest your money.

Domain Flipping Risks

Anyone can get started buying and selling domain names: all you need is a computer and a credit card. You should know the risks, however. Domain flipping isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme: like any other industries you have to be prepared to learn the tricks of the trade and work hard before you’ll see a profit.

Domain flipping risks include:

• Stiff competition: Low barriers to entry mean that there’s a lot of competition for valuable domains. Be careful, especially, in domain auctions.
• Legal concerns: Imitating any brand or trademark could put you at risk of legal challenges. Think twice before buying the domain appple.com.
• Market volatility: The domain investing market is connected to the wider economy. If fewer businesses are seeking domain names, then demand may fall.

Wrapping Up

There’s more to domain flipping than knowing how to buy and sell domain names. You have to identify emerging markets, follow industry trends, and make rapid assessments of domain value.

With time and energy though, your research can pay off. You’ll be able to spot a powerful, brandable domain name a mile off and sniff out an undervalued domain from a thousand yards.

Ready to start exploring? Atom’s Premium Domain Marketplace is an expert-vetted catalog of powerful and brandable domains.