One of the hard parts of getting your online presence on the right track is getting the right domain name that resonates with your company name and the services it offers.
Often times, companies will start by locally registering a company name with their local authorities then get to registering a domain name later.
Yes that is the normal way to go about it but the challenge comes when you actually find out that the domain name that reechos your company name and brand is actually taken by someone.
So is there a way to get a domain name that is already registered by someone else?
Well the quick answer is neither an absolute YES or a resounding NO. I will say it depends. The one thing I will say on good authority though is that if you manage to, you will be buying the domain at a higher price than the ongoing market value.
So how do you know if a domain that is already registered can be sold to you?
The first thing you will need to know is who owns the domain and how reputable they are. Lets say you want to buy example.com.
For those that may not know, the domains example.com and example.org are maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA, for documentation purposes. They have been reserved for the common good and they may be used as illustrative examples in documents without prior coordination with IANA.
Because this domain has been reserved for the good of everyone, its most likely that you will not be able to get it at any cost. Other domains may not be as impossible to buy but their net worth might be too high for your budget.
Lets say for example that you want to buy facebook.com. Facebook (the company) exists almost solely because of the domain facebook.com selling the domain is as good as selling the company! So if you attempt to register their domain they would sale it to you as though they were selling the entire business and it would be extremely expensive for them to consider any offers.
But not all domains are that hard to get. If you are looking at much cheaper but registered domains, the first thing you will need to do is find out if there is a website associated with your domain of choice.
Some domainers and speculators normally look for domains of value and register them with the aim of selling them at a slightly higher fee to make a profit. Such domains normally have no websites associated with them but may be parked by the registrar.
When you get such a domain the best way to proceed is to backorder the domain through your domain registrar of choice. If you do not know what backorder means, you may need to talk to your domain registrar and ask them to buy the domain name for you.
The current registrar would then ask for your offer and if he has more than one person interested you would have to do an auction where the highest bidder takes the domain.
But because the cost is a bit high, if it doesn’t really mean a lot to you, finding an alternative domain name or another extension might be the cheaper way than trying to buy an already registered domain name.
