Making money with typosquatting ?

[Danielist18]

Hi All,

I am doing research on my education websites and am contemplating buying incorrect spelling domains and then showing Google ads on those misspelled domain names. I have learned that Google doesn't question these domains for advertising purposes, even when it's obvious what I am doing. What do you think and do you have any websites I can look at?
THX

[Yuliya Mironova]

Originally Posted by Danielist18

What do you think and do you have any websites I can look at?

I think you need legal advice. Many companies will protect even misspellings of their registered trade-marks, and have the right to do so (in at least some countries, anyway). If their name is valuable enough for people to try to make money doing this, they can afford a lawyer or a legal department of their own. It might be that a formal "C and D" notice would be the worst legal problem you'd encounter, I suppose, but I certainly wouldn't fancy trying it, myself.

If trying it, I'd also suggest you should make sure you have pretty reliable "whois privacy protection" on all the domain names, because I'd imagine that when people look them up (which they certainly will at some point!) the overall effect could only be negative, rather than positive, regarding your reputation. Just my opinion.

[TiffanyB]

I don't think that this is going to be that profitable. First off you have to find misspelled domain names that are not taken that are on a highly searched site. Probably not easy to do. Most big companies will buy the misspelled domain names when they buy their normal domain name.

Also, if a person types something into Google search, if it is misspelled, it will give you the correct spelling, such as: searching for "dog house" and you enter "dog huose" it will say " did you mean dog house?" This eliminates a lot of misspelled domain names from every being clicked on as well.

I have heard of affiliate marketers buying a domain name that is very, very close or a mispelling of the product they are trying to sell and then basically having a redirect on the website to the correct one with their affiliate link so they get credit for the purchase. Not sure how much they actually make on these though.

[mrshannigan]

AmazoM.com was a success story using that technique, but I don't know how it ended. I think he ended up selling to Amazon or something.

I stumbled upon one the other day, I mis-spelled netflix. When I realized what I had done, I just clicked on the netflix ad in order to get to their site because I was so impressed with the clever-ness of the designer. The site was red and looked a lot like netflix, but one ad was for netflix and the other was for blockbuster.

I agree with posters who advise you to check out the legality first. I think the netflix-misspelled site might have been crossing the line a bit with the red background.

[John Lagoudakis]

When a popular clickbank product is about to be released I check to see if there are common misspellings of the domain name and if there is, I'll buy it (if available) and do a url redirect with my affiliate link.

The way I check the likelihood of a misspelled word is using Google's keyword tool.

An example of this is forexconqueror.com. Many people misspelled it as forexconquerer.com. I made a few quick sales and some easy profit

[funmommy]

I've seen misspellings go for thousands on auctions before because of the traffic they generated. It's a grey area.

[Lacie8]

there are definitely more profitable things you could spend your time doing.

if you were planning on putting adsense on those pages it would take quite awhile just to make the money back on what you spent on the domain name.

adsense in my opinion is just about the worst way to make money online unless you have thousands of websites out there with tons of content on them

just my 2 cents