Prior to registering a domain name for resale it is vital that you understand its true value. There are a plethora of domains for sale that have little or no commercial value with totally unrealistic asking prices. This current flooding of the market highlights the need for you to market your name at a realistic price.

What constitutes a useful, commercially valuable name? I have found the most useful way to identify a name of value is to view as many auctions sites as you can to see what names actually sell. You may spend hours dreaming up what you believe is a valuable domain but, crucially, a domain is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Therefore, some time spent viewing sites such as www.afternic.com, www.greatdomains.com and for UK based auctions www.domainnamesauctions.co.uk will afford an invaluable insight in to the sheer enormity of the market and what names do and do not sell and at what prices. In my view examples of commercially viable domains would be mortgagebrokering.net or loanbrokering.co.uk. Here you can see there is a distinct and marketable quality to these names but again, they are only worth what a potential buyer is prepared to pay. By way of example business.com sold for $7,500,000, loans.com sold for $3,000,000 and recently Afternic.com handled the sale of engineering.org for in excess of $198,000. These examples are clearly the cream of the sales but have, as you can see, very broad commercial applications.

.com's are regarded as the most valuable of all the domains with .net's being worth roughly half their more illustrious sibling and .co.uk's being worth probably a third of .com's. That is largely due to their being regarded as relevant only to the UK market.

Trademark conflicts?

Be careful not to register a domain that would infringe a trademark. For free trademark searches try www.marksonline.com Trademark conflicts are undesirable and can be costly so choose wisely.

It is well worth shopping round as prices vary wildly. We use "Easily" through our website as they offer the cheapest .com, .net and .co.uk domains and offer a very efficient service including free email and web address forwarding..

So patience is clearly a virtue in the domain name market. However, it is probably true to say that the fewer the names available the more desirable and valuable the truly viable domains will become.