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A comment left on Caroline’s Working a 10-Hour Week (for the AdSense Project) finally made me realize a potential opportunity that I have seen over and over and over but never recognized.
There are lots of people who own quite a few domains and built-out websites that are languishing from lack of attention — and that will be for the foreseeable future. They know there’s potential there, but, for a variety of reasons, that potential likely isn’t ever going to be recognized.
The problem is that what they’d sell for isn’t nearly enough to give them up. But with no time spent on them, it never will be either. It’s a classic catch-22.
What if there was a place, though, where you could post your list of domains and websites and trade with others who are in the same situation? You could use your assets to trade for someone else’s, and both of you would get far more in return than you would if you just sold them outright (or let them die a slow death).
This may already exist, so definitely let me know if it does. I have quite a list that I need to do something with.
This post in my Free Business Ideas series is only available in the RSS feed.
domainnoob
September 20, 2008 at
5:06 am
Well there was one. More about domain names than built-out sites. It started life out as SwapNames, but SnapNames made them change it. So they re-launched as Zuho. But Zuho resolves to a parked page now so I think they’ve gone under. If you’re curious, there’s some evidence of it here: http://www.aboutus.org/Zuho.com
I think they made a good go of it. I’m not sure what their business model was though–what was in it for them.
Caroline Middlebrook
September 20, 2008 at
5:50 am
What a great idea! I saw the comment but never thought of that at all!
Tom - StandOutBlogger.com
September 20, 2008 at
10:14 am
This is something I would love! I have a lot of domains that I never did anything with and would love the chance to swap them for something else!
Eric D
September 20, 2008 at
10:48 am
That is a good idea. I have been thinking along the same lines. I have toyed with the idea of sitting up a “barter” site geared to the MMO and SEO community. The idea is to barter rather than pay for services. We all have some talents but very few have all the talents. If we could combine our resources in a way that wouldn’t break our pocketbook then I think we would all see continued and increased success. For instance I am a pretty good banner designer (or so I have been told) and I seem to have a knack for SEO as most of my websites are on Google front page. But I am crap at some back end programming and automation stuff… i would glady trade some seo work for some automation work.
Maybe I will continue to work this out do a barter for services site. What do you think of something like that?
Barter For Services Site - Would You Use One | Learn SEO |SEO Tools & Techniques | Search Engine Optimization
September 20, 2008 at
11:06 am
[...] reading a comment on http://www.AskShane.org about a comment he read on http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog about something he saw that got his [...]
Shane
September 21, 2008 at
10:11 am
@Eric: I like that idea, too. That’s the way things work informally a lot of times anyway, so it would be nice to put some more structure around it and make it easy to do.
Moe
September 23, 2008 at
3:27 pm
I wonder if Sitepoint’s Marketplace could be used for that purpose? It’s not a “swap” site, but I’ll bet if Sitepoint added that as a category it would garner a lot of interest.
Shane
September 23, 2008 at
8:13 pm
I think you’re absolutely right, Moe. It would need to be a little different format than their current marketplace, but it seems like they could do something like that pretty easily.