Domain Development Drop List – Expiring Names With Great Development Potential

This is a first for me and I’m pretty excited about it. As a Domainer I’m a big fan of drop lists and have a few go-to sites that I visit with Domain Shane probably being my overall favorite. I’ve found some great domains I might have otherwise have missed and it’s always great to hear another investors commentary on a potential opportunity. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the process I follow to buy domain names for development and then it hit me – why don’t I do a weekly post with good domain development drops?

So this is issue #1 and I thought I’d explain the very basic criteria behind how I evaluate domains for development potential:

  1. Search Volume – this is the most important for me, I like to see at least 1,000 exact-match searches with reasonable traffic around related terms as well.
  2. CPC – I have a very simple way of looking at this – the higher the CPC the more valuable customers in this niche are to companies. I think of this as getting more bang for your buck or being able to sell your traffic at a higher price. Great example of this is a debt site I run vs. a sports site, they both get roughly the same amount of visitors and clicks but the debt site makes 10x what the sports site makes! If the CPC is below $0.50 I tend to ignore it
  3. PR and Backlinks of Competition – last but certainly not least I want to understand what level of SEO the top three sites in Google have done. If they are all PR 6 sites with thousands of backlinks it could take me years to beat them. My goal is to find a niche where the top sites are PR0, PR1, and PR2 if I can.

Since my plan is to start-out by doing this weekly I’ll be sharing domains that are expiring within the next three days. Now let’s get started with my first domain development drop list!

FishingApparel.net – 1,000 exact-match global searches and a CPC of $1.46 is perfect for me, nice advertiser interest and enough traffic to be interesting. If you do a Google search for “fishing apparel” you’ll find this is already ranked #3 and the #2 site is a PR1 with less than 100 backlinks. Great development candidate and easy to monetize thanks to good affiliate programs in the fishing space. The Bass Pro Affiliate program would probably be my top choice for a site like this.

SixSigmaMethodology.org – 3,600 exact-match global searches and a CPC of $6.00. This is a lucrative niche and a great exact-match domain in the space. The only major challenge here is that all the sites above the fold have very solid backlink profiles and high PR. This means that while you could make it to page one, you might not get above-the-fold. Still, being on page one for this term would still bring reasonable traffic and revenue and give you a nice ROI if you can nab the name for a few hundred bucks or less.

OpenBankAccountOnline.org – 3,600 exact-match global searches and a CPC of $20. This domain has some flip potential as well as a high revenue potential given how valuable a visitor in this niche is. The warning I give with this domain is that you’ll need a hefty SEO budget to make money here. The space is VERY competitive and while I’m including this domain in my list because it does have great stats, this is not one that I myself would purchase or try to build-out. That being said there are plenty of people who read my blog that do have a budget for SEO and this domain does have great revenue potential in a niche with a healthy amount of traffic.

Teaching-Degree.net – okay, so this domain does not have great flip potential on it’s own, but if you’re just looking at development, it’s perfect. Remember, Google and Bing don’t care about dashes, they do not hurt rankings at all. With 3,600 exact-match global monthly searches and a CPC north of $16 this is a great development candidate. The first page of Google has a good range of sites, some without major backlinks profiles. The education space is very lucrative as you can see from the $16 CPC, just don’t expect anyone to buy this domain from you until it’s making real money.

GEDTest.us – it may be stupid of me to do this but I actually really want this name and have backordered it. If I end up having people bidding against me because I wrote this post, so be it. Here’s why I like this domain – the search volume is great with 12,100 exact-match global searches and a CPC of $2.02. The education niche is a great with a lot of good affiliate partnership opportunities and there’s a site on the first page of Google with less than 50 backlinks. One thing I really like about .US is that they rank just as well as .COM but nobody really goes for them in the expiry market.

That’s it for this week, please let me know if you like this feature and if you think doing this weekly would be valuable to you. As you probably know by now I’m all about feedback so never be afraid to comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton