You’ve maybe heard that there are such things as “expired domains” but you’re not sure how buying an expired domain can help you. Som what is an expired domain?

Put simply, an expired domain is a domain name that has come to the end of the time it’s been registered for and hasn’t been renewed.

As with anything in life, there are all sorts of possible reasons this may have happened - it’s possible the domain’s owner simply forgot to renew, there’s a possibility the domain registrar didn’t remind the owner (or used an out of date email address to tell them), it’s quite likely the domain seemed like “a good idea at the time” but the owner never actually used the domain and just let it sit in cyberspace. There are hundreds of reasons why a domain name has expired.

So how can you make money from expired domains?

For a start, Google are said to give more importance to domains the older they are. By definition, a domain name that has expired has been around for a minimum of a year, so it’s older than buying a new domain.

Secondly, if the domain was used, there may be existing links to the site. There’s also a very good chance that the search engines will know about it and will have indexed it.

The icing on the cake is if it actually has a Google Page Rank.

Yeah, you read that right. Some expired domains have a Page Rank and traffic.

The trouble is, you won’t be the only person on the planet who is hunting for expired domains. The best of them are snapped up within minutes or even seconds of becoming available.

Which means that if you are thinking about buying one or more expired domains either for a site of your own or to “fix up” and sell on to others, you’ll need to be quick off the mark.

The easiest way to do this is to use one of the online services that will show you a targeted list of domains that are due to expire soon. This gives you a head start and will allow you to snap up the domain names you’re interested in as soon as they expire and are allowed to be purchased again.

Check out this excellent affordable service to hunt down expired domains here.