I was doing some research earlier with a friend on mispelt domain names and the ability to make a killing by registering web domain which are mispelt popular words and domains. We contacted a friend of ours who has experience in this realm and he’s actually making a small salary off this technique! I really wanted to share one or two of his domains with all of you, but he’s politely asked that I don’t and I have to respect his request.

I did some googling, to see what I could find with regards to such a topic and my first stop was having a look at the most commly misspelt words in the english language. I came across this list of mispelt words, which could be really useful.

My second stop was too see what resources there were on typosquatting, which is the practise of registering mispelt domain names to make money - sort of like cyber-squatting.

"Simple typing errors are turning into big bucks — and major legal disputes — for some companies that are trying to capitalize on misspelled domain names. The practice is called "typosquatting," and it involves registering misspelled names of popular domain names like Yahoo (stock: YHOO), Amazon (stock: AMZN), and Microsoft (stock: MSFT). Companies that register the names direct Web surfers who misspell an Internet address to other sites that make money off of the mistyped names." Read more..

Here is something interesting I read online: "Just for fun I once registered some miss-spelled popular domain names. I just wanted to see how many times a day people forgot to put the . between the www and the domain name like wwwsomesomain.com I didn’t want to do anything with the visitors so I just redirected them to the real domain and watched the web stats for the default.htm The problem was they were online banking URL’s. After about 3 months I was contacted by the legal department for one of the banks and informed this was called typo squatting, and it was Illegal. They requested that I transfer the wwwdomain.com to them. I did and avoided what could have been a bad situation. It was very stupid, my advice is not to do it, it is just not worth the problems it could cause."

That’s an interesting dynamic isn’t it?

Well, I am off to have a look and see what else I can find, leave your comments behind, it would be interesting! Hmmm, wwwfacebook.com ~ bloody typosqautters!