We've talked about registering new domain names but you will quickly find that there aren't many good words or terms have been left unregistered. That is one reason why a lot of people try to catch expired domains that are being dropped by others.

Why would you want domains other people are giving up on? Because even though there is a lot of junk in the discard pile, there are also some real gems. Good domains can drop for a number of reasons. The original owner may have changed email addresses without notifying their registrar causing them to miss their renewal notices.  

A domain also may have been owned by a company that has gone out of business or someone may have dropped a valuable domain simply because they didn't realize it had value. Some of these expiring domains have a nice flow of traffic because they were once live websites and people still go looking for them. That traffic can be converted into money by setting up pay per click pages that show ads for products related to what those surfers are looking for.

The traffic may come from people manually typing in the domain (behavior that can be tracked with the Overture tool we talked about in the Choosing Names section). Traffic may also come from links from other websites to the site that once existed on the domain that is dropping. You can see if a domain name has any existing links that might deliver traffic by entering the domain at MarketLeap.com.

Since it is possible to find better names in the daily drops than you can find among unregistered domains, the drop game has become extremely competitive. High quality .coms routinely sell for thousands of dollars in expired name auctions. Other extensions are cheaper but there are still plenty of people chasing good keywords in all of the major extensions.

In order to play this game, you need to know what names are dropping each day and where you go to bid on them. There are several websites that offer basic daily drop lists at no charge, including JustDropped.com. You can also subscribe to more extensive lists at pay services or buy desktop drop management software that can easily be found through a Google search.

Identifying the domains you are interested in is fairly easy (though it does require a good bit of research time). Unfortunately it isn't as easy to bid on the domains you want. There is no central location where everyone goes to place their bids. Unfortunately the expired name business today is a crazy quilt of multiple venues that takes a lot of time and energy to navigate.

You have no choice but to use these various services because they have access to the super fast registry connections that allow them to grab domains before an individual buyer could do so through manual attempts at registration.

There are large venues like SnapNames.com and Pool.com that will go after names regardless of where they were originally registered, but there are also other auctions run by the individual registrars that include only domains that are expiring from their service (GoDaddy.com does this and several others are making plans to do the same).

Big sites like SnapNames and Pool have also set up arrangements with a number of registrars that gives them exclusive rights to auction off names that expire from those registrars. So you have to find out where an expiring domain is registered so you will know what site you have to go to to place a bid. You can find this information by looking up the domain in the public WhoIs record. If all of this sounds like a pain - you're right, it is!

Still another thing you might want to consider is purchasing a desktop script that will check for available domains every 1-5 seconds and will register any you specify if they become available. These scripts are not fast enough to beat the big drop catching companies that have direct registry connections. However they can help you land names that were not back-ordered with the pros because they can beat people who try to manually register  dropping domains. These scripts only work with a specific registrar. DNWare.com makes one that works with Enom.com and another that works with Moniker.com.

Even though there are a lot of bases to cover, it may be worthwhile to invest your time and money in expiring domains if you want to build the best portfolio possible. Still, this can be a time consuming and expensive way to acquire names.

Some try to short circuit the process by contacting the owners of domains due for renewal directly to see if they can buy the domains before they expire. This also takes a lot of legwork, but it's just another illustration of how much work it takes to succeed in the domain business.