While it’s possible, if you’re extremely lucky, to find the one diamond among tens of thousands of pieces of glass and be fast enough to grab it after it expires, chances are there’s someone out there that is going to get it before you. There are a lot of expired domains out there, but some of them are expired for a reason. Buried somewhere in the huge pile of worthless, ‘glass’ domains, though, are one or two that with a little buffing and polishing will be revealed for the gems they are. These gems can be found in two different pools of expired domain names.

The first pool of expired domain names is usually more valuable. This is when the expired domains first hit the market. Unfortunately, though, during “the drop” there are a lot of companies out there trying to snatch up the valuable domains for customers who have placed a backorder with them. At this stage, there are a lot of valuable domain names up for grabs, but there’s also a lot of very fierce competition. While you can try to manually pick up an expired domain during “the drop,” if you’re just one person, you don’t have much of a chance unless the domain name is one that no one else is interested in.

The domains that aren’t sold during the drop are still available. Of course, most of the very obvious big money domain names are gone by this point and the domain name drop giants slink off to wait for the next drop. This second pool of expired domains is still very large, though, and contains quite a few valuable domains. They may not be as valuable as those that disappeared during the domain name drop, but if you can multiply your investment by 1,000% or even more, you can see why expired domains at this stage are still valuable.

If you can snatch an expired domain name at either stage and it’s the right one, you can either develop the domain name for yourself by launching a website or resell the domain to an interested party for a tidy profit. Either way, just knowing about expired domain names and the process they go through can go a long way in giving you an advantage over a lot of your competitors online.