Hi WHT,
I thought I would try my hand at buying dropping domain names and putting ads on them and trying to make a few extra dollars. I didn't have high hopes for this as I already have some sites with Adwords that get a lot of traffic but I don't get a lot of click throughs.
After a few hours of research I decided on 5 names and put in bids at the usual places. I lost out on my top 4 sites and got my 5th choice. This name was not a particularly great name as it was 3 words and long but it was a .com. When I researched the name there were a few hundred backlinks in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The PR was 4 or 5 (I don't remember now) and there were a lot of indexed pages. By the time I got the name the PR was 0 and Google had no more backlinks or indexed pages and there were only a handful of backlinks on Yahoo and MSN. I was VERY disappointed. So I put up my site with Adwords and after 2 months I had made $1.00. Now I'm thinking at this rate it will take years to get my $60 back that I had bid for the name. I figured it was worth a try but I figured I wouldn't do it again.
It wasn't long after that I got a call from the company that let the name drop. Apparently it was an accident and they wanted it back. So they asked me how much I wanted for it and I asked them how much were they offering. We went back and forth a few times like this and they finally said $500. After I picked my jaw up off the floor I accepted their offer. I thought about trying to eek out a few more dollars but I felt like this was a generous offer and I didn't want to be greedy.
I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me. Now if I only had a crystal ball to pick the next name....
Linear Mode
