Domaining MBA Monday: 3 Ways To Avoid Buying Junk Domains

Good evening and welcome to Domaining MBA Monday. I normally write this post on Sunday night and schedule it for Monday morning however Daina and I had an incredibly busy week in New York City last week and I’m still playing a bit of catch-up. That being said, I think I’m just about completely caught-up which brings us to this blog post and a very important topic that hopefully will save you a lot of money, or at the very least prevent you from wasting more money.

What I want to talk about are three simple rules to help you avoid buying junk domains. What are junk domains? These are domains that you’re never going to sell, never going to monetize, but for some reason you’ll just keep renewing holding onto a dream that someday they’ll make you a small fortune.

I’m here to crush your dreams and give you a reality check, you can’t get your MBA without a bit of dream crushing, right? So let’s dive-into three ways you can avoid buying junk domains.

  1. Never buy an expired domain just because it has a lot of bids – do your research. Just because there are other people bidding on a domain doesn’t mean that it’s valuable. There are plenty of domains that get lots of bids and will sit collecting dust in your portfolio for a long time. Yes, there are also great domains that get lots of bids but to know the difference you need to do your research and make sure you have the data to back-up why it is a good purchase, don’t go on bids alone.
  2. Avoid TLDs you don’t know anything about – just because a hot one-word .VC name is available doesn’t mean you’ve stumbled on a goldmine. I’ve seen far too many people build-up portfolios of one-word domains in TLDs that nobody on the planet wants to buy, there’s probably a reason why a killer keyword is available in that extension and it’s not because you’re the first to discover it.
  3. Be very careful with trend domains – ah trend domains. I’m not going to say you can’t make money on trends, I have and plenty of other people have. What I will say is make sure you really understand what you’re buying and if that trend really has any hope of surfacing. Sure, registering one or two won’t hurt, but I’ve seen people with portfolios of thousands of trend domains which means massive renewal fees. Save yourself the pain and buy some lottery tickets because it will be cheaper and your chances are about the same. Once again, I’m not saying you can’t make money on trend domains, but I am saying they shouldn’t constitute a majority of your portfolio.

As always I’d love to hear from you, what are some of the other things you have avoided buying junk domains? Or feel free to share some of the junk domains you bought, we’ve all bought them, don’t be afraid to share them!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton