You never know when a domain’s chances of selling will increase.

I renew many of my domains six months or more in advance. If I know I’m going to renew them, I like to knock them out in bulk so I don’t have to worry about them and deal with reminder notices.

When I’m on the fence about a domain I usually wait until the last couple months to decide if I want to renew it. I run analytics on them to determine the likelihood of them selling, see if people have registered the domains in other extensions, and check how much pay-per-click revenue they make. I often make a delete decision a couple of months before expiration and turn off autorenew.

But I learned an important lesson recently with one of my domains. I originally registered the domain back in 2004. That was before Google had figured out that it should take search juice away from expired domains. Back then I’d create crappy sites on domains and, at one point, was earning over $1,000 a day in Adsense revenue across lots of these expired domains. Click here to continue reading…