by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 06, 2010

One investor earned $11 million by selling a single domain name: Sex.com. And four others sold for at least 10 million dollars, according to a report by C|Net TV. News coverage of the high-priced sales have taught geeks a valuable lesson: if you purchase the right domain name, it's possible to get rich.  How rich? Take a look at C|Net's list of the top five most expensive domain-name sales of all time.

Business.com set a record in 1999, when it sold for $7.5 million. But in 2007, Porn.com sold for even more money - a whopping $9.5 million. The next year, Fund.com sold for $10 million. And a silent auction was held for one of most valuable domains of all - Poker.com - with its final sale price reported at somewhere between $10 million and $20 million.

Unfortunately, most of the high-value domain names have already been taken - but there's still opportunities to make a profit by snatching up domain names - and then selling them at a hefty mark-up. Many services will allow you to register a domain name for less than $20, so it's easy to try guessing what will become the next superstar URL. Your odds increase if you buy a lot of different domains - and you'll have to hope that at least one of them can be sold at enough of a profit to earn back your original investment!

It's not as hard as it sounds, because some web sites already offer a thriving "domain marketplace". For example, Sedo.com is a free service that lets you publish the domains that you're trying to sell - along with your minimum asking price. But C|Net also notes an important caveat: some domain sales are arranged in private. This means their actual value isn't reported in the press, so it's possible that some domain names are actually being sold for a lot more money. Because the sales are never reported, it's impossible to know which domain names are the most valuable. But if you become an experienced domain investor, you could find your way into a profitable private niche!

In the 1990s, the internet reached a milestone: every three-letter combination had been purchased. This is the secret reason why many web sites create nonsense names for themselves or combine two words into a new - or simply try to build their brand identity around an ordinary word with a poetic significance (like Google or Beyond.com). It's hard to predict which domains they'll want to purchase, but that's part of the fun of domain investing. You could be the first owner of a URL that will someday be used by millions.

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