You had a great idea for a new website and you immediately hurried off to search for a domain name at a registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap…only to find you can’t come up with a related domain name that’s actually available. It’s a situation most webmasters have found themselves in at one time or another. So what do you do? Often times, you end up buying a domain name you’re not all that happy with. Next time this happens to you, try checking out the secondary market before you give up on finding that perfect gem.

GoDaddy Auctions is sort of like eBay for domain names. Although domains there can go for tens of thousands of dollars, don’t let that discourage you. There are thousands of domain names available for much, much less than that. Some are even cheaper than the typical annual renewal fee so you may even find one for less than ten bucks. If your budget will allow you to spend a few hundred dollars or so, there are some great two and three word dot coms available in that price range. Many of these domain names are several years old, so you may even get the advantage of having an aged domain.

It’s easy to narrow the field of available domain names using GoDaddy’s flexible search feature. You can plug your keywords into the search box and find domains that begin with, end with or simply contain your selected keywords. You can narrow the range even more by selecting a minimum and maximum price. You can also choose to look at only certain domain extensions like .com and .net.  This can be a great way to find some good niche type domains. To show you how easy it is using a niche like dog training, I entered the words “dogtraining” in the search box, set the keyword parameters to “contains”, selected a price range of $100-$500 and chose to show only .coms and .nets. A sample of the results is shown below.

Looking at that list, I see some good opportunities if I were planning a website about dog training. DogTrainingHints.com would be especially attractive to me and at less than $300, it wouldn’t break the bank if you were expecting your site to make a decent monthly income. What about doing a site targeting cow dogs? CowDogTraining.com would be perfect!

I did another search using “homeinspect” as the keywords to search domains targeting the home inspection niche.

StandardHomeInspections.com wouldn’t be a bad domain name at all for the home inspection market and if I were targeting the New York City area, NYCHomeInspections.com would be an extremely targeted keyword rich domain.

Before you can place a bid or purchase a domain at GoDaddy Auctions, you’ll have to sign up, but it’s only five bucks a year. Purchasing a domain is easy because GoDaddy handles the transaction for you. You simply pay GoDaddy and they take care of getting the funds to the seller. Then, the domain pops up in the domain manager of your GoDaddy account. It’s that simple. The next time you’re having trouble finding a good domain name, you should head on over to GoDaddy Auctions and take a look. You might be surprised at what you find.