Bad at Spelling? It Could Make You a Millionaire…

We’re all guilty of it.  We try to type a domain name into our web browser only to discover we’ve misspelled it and end up on a site we didn’t intend to. Although this can be frustrating for us as consumers, there are a few people who are making millions from all of our spelling errors.

One of these serial ‘misspellers’ is Kevin Ham. Ham is an entrepreneur who was recently featured in Business Magazine and has made his fortune by buying up websites like NewYorkTime.com. Did you catch that? The domain is missing the “s” at the end and it’s a common mistake that thousands of people make every day.

The way Ham makes money is by channeling all of those lost visitors into what is known as a “landing page”. The landing page is usually a simple website, but it is covered in advertisements. Ham gets paid every a few cents every time one of us clicks on those ads.

A few cents per visitor might not seem like a lot, but when you have millions of visitors stumbling to your page every year, it can add up quickly. In addition, Ham doesn’t just own NewYorkTime.com; he has slowly built up a portfolio of more than 300,000 domain names than generate more than $70 million dollars every year!

See for yourself: Try typing in “money.cm” instead of “money.com” and you’ll find that you land on a page filled with Google ads. It’s pretty genius.

Think You Suck At Spelling?

You can do this yourself, but you’ll have to be fast.  Ham buys domains by the thousands and there are more and more competitors every day. Some of these domain buyers also have high-tech software that help them scour the internet for websites where the owner has let the registration expire. That allows them to pick up the domain for dirt cheap.

Here are a few tips that will help you get started making money off of misspelled domains:

• Identify domains with high page ranking.  There are a variety of tools and software designed to identify Yahoo, Google, and Alexa page ranking online.  These will help you determine which sites get the most traffic and therefore are considered the most profitable.
• Determine which domains are misspelled most often.  Any popular website can be typed into a search field incorrectly.  Think about domain names that you visit often and try to think of ways it could misspelled. Perhaps a superfluous “s” at the end” or a “.cm” instead of a “.com”
• Consider buying other variations of the misspelled domain (those that include hyphens are a good example).  Use a tool like the one found on NameTumbler.com to generate a list of possible domains for sale.  You can use certain criteria to identify the best combinations of words and phrases.
• Start making money off of other people’s spelling mistakes.  Once you’ve registered the domain, you can put up your ad-filled site and start watching the cash roll in!  The more domains you have, the better.

The best and most profitable domains get snatched up quickly, but if you are persistent you might just get lucky and find the next Ebay.com. Good luck on building your domain empire!