Everyone – well, everyone in my social circles, has a stash of great domain names that were bought in a moment of inspiration and are renewed annually in a pitiful sacrifice to the God of good intentions.

It’s high time to give someone else a crack at it, and what better way than to transfer it off to a good home?

I mean you could just let it expire. Maybe there’s a budding entrepreneur out there looking for that exact domain!

However, you and I know that it will probably end up in a spam farm in eastern europe churning out mechanically spun content interspersed with links to erectile dysfunction pills.

There is a better way – host a Domain Name Key Party.

The price of entry is one domain name and the transfer code. There are a few options for distributing the domains. I like the idea of hosting a contest where groups or individuals can bid on specific domains by giving an elevator pitch describing what they would do with it. The best pitch wins that domain. If the winner has already won a domain they have to put it back into the running. That will encourage some interesting sharing of ideas and alliances.

You definitely want to have some rules.

• .com only unless it’s really clev.er or short
• No hyphens
• No useless numbers
• Nothing listed on every bot list and spam blacklist on the internet
• If it’s on GoDaddy, it’s coming off. For the elephants.

Finally, if there are any ugly domains standing awkwardly in the corner at the end of the night, be a sport and alias them into a threesome with something with a lot of keywords in the right places, if you know what I mean.

What domains do you have that need a bigger yard to play in?