At some point while you're building your website, you're going to have to buy a domain name. This is the address that users type into their browsers to reach your site. That takes about five seconds, and depending on the name you want and whether anyone else owns it, it wont cost you more than a few bucks.



But domain names are also a golden opportunity to make some easy money.

I'm not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up good names and sell them for a profit. The bottom has fallen out of the market and the best domains are long gone.

I'm talking about expiring domains.

Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then lose interest and move on, leaving their site active. That means that although they still own the domain, they're not actively promoting it. But they don't need to. All the automatic marketing systems they've put in place are still bringing in traffic. The site basically runs itself.

Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the market, you've got a pre-built stream of customers. You can either rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to your domain. You could set up an affiliate program and profit from visitors someone else worked very hard to acquire, but then gave up. Their loss is your gain.

It's that easy.

There are tons of options, and lots of easy ways to make lots of money with very little effort. Opportunities like these are everywhere.

You can use the Alexa.com search engine to research the traffic flow for potential domain names you hope to acquire or there are even services available that will alert you when a domain is about to expire, and buy it for you. You can search on "Expired Domain Services" to find these companies.

Expired domains are like digging for diamonds in the rough, and could easily put thousands of extra dollars in your pocket each year if utilized properly.