There are three different ways to market a domain name yourself, depending on the effort you are willing to expend and how quickly you would like to sell the domain name. You can choose to do nothing, set up a basic web page, or create an active site.

Do Nothing
The simplest way to market the domain name requires no extra effort after the domain name is bought. Just do nothing, and wait for a potential buyer to look up your domain name, see that it is already taken, and send you an offer to purchase it from you. As you can no doubt guess, the chances of success from such a passive method are fairly slim, unless you have somehow managed to reserve a truly fantastic name that everyone else missed.

Set up a basic Web page
The next step up is to create a very simple page connected to that domain, with a short message such as "The following domain names are for sale. Please contact <e-mailaddress@domain.com> for more details." followed by a list of the domain names for sale. The benefits of this sales method is that it requires very little time and effort, yet it allows potential buyers to at least visit your site on the web, even if there is nothing there.

You will need to link your web page to your domain name. This is beyond the scope of this introductory document. Please consult with your ISP for more details, or find out the information independently.

Create an active site
If you are prepared to devote a great deal of time and effort to marketing the domain name, there is only one possible line of attack: create a fully-fledged web site, attract visitors to the site and place a notice prominently somewhere on the site to indicate that the domain name is for sale. The decision to create an active site should not be made lightly; in order to attract sizeable numbers of visitors and increase the chances of selling your domain name, the site should provide interesting, useful information.

The benefits of an active site are two-fold. Firstly, a site which attracts many visitors will have a greatly increased chance of catching a buyer's eye in the fickle world of cyberspace. Secondly, if the site is popular enough, it could be put on the market as a going concern: the buyer purchases not only the rights to the domain name, but also the information [and readership] of the site. This is similar to the goodwill factor for shops: purchasing a successful bakery will cost more than purchasing a vacant shop and turning it into a bakery, as the daily flow of customers has been factored into the sales price. Equally, a successful, popular web page is worth more than an empty site.

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