Take More Risks

Well hello there! I’ve spent the weekend so far forraging around Deleted Domains for expired 4 character .com’s. There’s much debate about the future of this specific type of name – with many predicting that they’ll only continue to increase in value as more and more of the .com’s are snapped up.

I think I’ll invest in a few over the coming days if I can actually find anything worthwhile. I won’t be registering any old fxf0.com!

Anyhow, I’ve noticed a few trends so far that I’d thought I’d share with you.

1. A domain name with numbers in it will be generally worth less than one comprised entirely of letters.
2. It seriously helps if the letters form an acronym. Acronym Finder is your friend here.
3. Pronouncability is key. Try ringing up a friend and reading your name down the phone to them. If they can understand you first time you might be on to a winner. You can’t cheat and read out each letter by the way!
4. Enter the domain name without the TLD into a Google Search. Generally the more results that are returned the more potential the domain has. Use this as part of a vetting process only. You’ll need to analyze the strength of the returned sites before you have a true indicator of the domains strength.
5. You might even want to check the domains Alexa Rating. It’s pretty doubtful that you’ll come across an expired name with a significant amount of traffic. Most are snapped up by backordering services like Pool.com, who charge a minimum of $60 per name.
6. Hypenated names are generally worth next to nothing. There are exceptions however.

It would be cool to pick up one with existing traffic, although I’m pretty wary about capturing names that people genuinely need. I’ve fallen foul of this before myself with vibewaves.com which was receiving over 5000 uniques a day. I guess you could say it was my fault for not registering it again on time, still I don’t think it’s entirely fair especially if you’ve invested a lot of time creating something that adds to the Internet.

Pc Names is a valuable resource for finding expiring names with traffic. Be aware that most of the names on the site will go to auction on Pool.com.

In the past, a popular technique for generating revenue with parked domains involved targetting an extremely focused niche with little competition, registering a domain containing the desired keywords and linking back to it so that Google indexed the targetted page.

On Friday I registered a number of domains including crazyweddingvows.info which was targetted towards, yes you’ve guessed it, the search phrase “Crazy Wedding Vows”. Since then I’ve yet to receive a single hit from the search engines which isn’t surprisingly considering Google in particular continues to tighten it’s duplicate content filters.

So is search powered PPC domain parking dead? Many would hope so, but until MSN follows Google’s lead and takes a hardened stance against spam the market is still live.

How To Exploit Search Powered PPC Domain Parking For Your Benefit.

Start with the Adwords Keyword Sandbox, pick a broad top-level search term such as travel and attempt to narrow your search phrase down until you’ve found a phrase with at least some demand and very little supply. You can check how many page’s are targetting a specific phrase through a Google search. Be sure to encapsulate your search phrase in quotes like so.

Generally, the fewer results Google returns the better which implies that there is less competition for that phrase. However this isn’t always the case, if you want to profile the competition more extensively, download and install the SEO for Firefox plugin, which will give you a much more thorough breakdown of your competitors strengths and weaknesses.

Narrowing your search down

The keywords you target don’t necessarily have to be very popular. Remember you are outlaying a maximum of $10 on a domain name here – to double your inital investment you have to make back on average $0.05 a day for a year. Since .info’s are a third of the price of .com/.net/.org’s they may or may not be the way to go depending on your preference!

I found the phrase “Crazy Wedding Vows” through Wordtracker - which is a superb tool for finding all sorts of valuable niche phrases. You can perform a competition search on a batch of keywords with each phrases desirability being measured by the KEI index ratio (which essentially divides the total number of results returned by the search engine against the total number of searches performed on that keyword over a certain period).

Park it baby!

Once you’ve found a suitable keyphrase to target, register the domain and then park it with someone like Namedrive. Namedrive and other domain parking agents allow you to select a keyphrase to associate with each domain which should normally contain the words comprising the domain. You might want to experiment with adding in other related words here to increase the likelihood of ranking for phrases that you hadn’t originally intended for.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll make millions using this method but you might well find it provides you with a little extra income.

I’ve just registered the following 4 .info domains at Dynadot with the intention of carrying out a little experiment over on Namedrive.

Funny Wedding Vows.info
Cats Funny Pictures.info
Funny Christian Skits.info
Funny Monkey Pictures.info

The plan is to park these domains and make back double my inital investment of $11.96 (hey big spender!) within 3 months. It’s been a while since I’ve experimented with monetizing domains on Namedrive so this should be something new at least.

If it’s successful it’ll contribute at least a little to hosting and to new domain registration costs. If it isn’t I might have to cease all of my operations and declare bankrupcy. $12 could buy me a bottle of low-grade vodka after all.

Have you ever wondered how some lucky souls manage to make a living off selling domains on the web?

I have. And I still do in fact but that’s because I’m a incredibly lazy sod, and I’d rather spend hours on end scratching my own behind than actually working towards earning more from the domain industry.

Imagine my surprise when I received an email back in October 2006 notifying me of a bid on one of my domains for $850 – having only registered the domain a week previously.

I thought someone was pulling my leg. It was if I had just discovered a button on my keyboard with “PrtMoney” written on it.

Awful jokes aside, what follows is a fairly comprehensive guide to registering and selling valuable domains rapidly. Who knows, you might just be the person who registers the domain that knocks the $14,000,000 Sex.com off the Most Expensive domain top spot!
(continue reading…)

I have a proven track record for choosing seriously awful domain names. I mean look at the address bar for a start! Horrendous.

Completely sold out. 

Thanks to everyone who bidded and commiserations to those who didn’t receive a domain this time around. I hope to hold something similar in the future only with a better system and better names.

• Largetesticles.net – sold
• Meatisdinner.com – sold
• Jerkingoff.info – sold
• Freecsscode.com – sold
• Stopcrashing.com – sold
• Traindogs.info – sold
• Overclocked.info – sold
• Ajaxlibraries.com – sold
• Csstext.com – sold

And buys the SEO Book e-book. Brilliant read so far but ultimately depressing because it seriously shows up some of my old practices. This is good though. What’s the point in gripping onto old ideas that work for no-one anymore?

I need to realise that I’m not an expert at Internet Marketing. This false belief inhibits progress. There is always more out there to learn. And there always will be. There should never be a point where I consider myself as an expert. To me being an expert reeks of complacancy and arrogance.
On the subject of money, I believe I still have about $200 of the cash I received from the sale of core2quad.com. I’ll need this for buying domains for the 50 site challenge.

That’s going pretty well at the moment. I finished a website on Marijuana Facts tonight. I’m just finishing off a comedy site on vampires too. Heh! I’ll release the addresses later on in the week. Both are a little patchy at the moment y’see. I’m still behind by 2 websites but luckily at the moment I keep coming up with great ideas.

Gonna stop now soon for the night and read another chapter of the SEO Book.

I just logged into my Namedrive account for the first time in ages this morning to find that I have actually made something this month. This came as quite a shock as I was almost certain that this revenue avenue was closed off – however it doesn’t seem to be that way. Earning this month are particularly modest as you can see from the picture below but every little helps I guess. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to targetting websites with any of the PPC parking programs as I think it’s in bad faith. In order to make money you seem to need to register popular typo domains and I’m not really willing to do that.

Nor am I willing to start setting aside domains that could be developed instead. If you are just starting out I’d advise against investing a lot of your resources into this type of domain. I think it’s healthly to have a gamble though definitely, just don’t expect too much in return immediately.

And never ever rely on it as your only stream of revenue if you do have a bit of joy with this method. Then again, this applies to absolutely any means of income in any field of life. Talk about stating the obvious eh?

Anyhow that puts me $1 closer to receiving my first ever payment. Wahey.

I’ve started work on a new project – goatboy.info which is a dedication to the late and great Bill Hicks. I’m using the site as a platform to demo the Cake PHP framework which is turning out to be extremely useful. Getting used to it’s little quirks will take a while though but I’m getting there.

Sold a few more sites over the last week including obsure80music.com for $20 (which was a bargain) and givingupsmoking.info for $60 (half of which went to my partner). I’m still working away on the blogcram website and it’s going well. I was thinking of basing it around Cake PHP too but I’ve decided against it in the meantime. I’ll continue making use of Smarty and CakePHP with it.

I’m hoping to raise enough money over the next few weeks to buy a content site with some revenue. It’d be cool to pick up a music blog or something like that. I’d probably need to spend at least $500 to pick up a decent one though. In the meantime it’s full steam ahead with development. I want to release one of my blogcram meme’s to the public within the next week, so hopefully that goes well.

Actually that’s lie! It’s a real pain trying to decide which ones to leave and which to keep. In the past few weeks 6 or so have been up for renewal and I’ve only completed the process for 4 of them thus far. I’ve no intention of renewing 3 of the 4 and I’m as of yet undecided over whether I should rescue the last or not as it is may be of some value to me in the future.

It’s good to see those 3 go though! At least now I can erase them from the list. It’s quite depressing when you login to your portfolio and see nothing but failure there!

Ah crap just got another email from Dynadot warning me about another domain expiring within 10 days. Thats 4 altogether expiring within the same time period and I’m not sure whether it’s worth keeping any of them. 2 of them are showing promise recently but I suspect it might only be fleeting.

I haven’t mentioned any of the domain names for obvious reasons. It must seem like I’m talking in code or something here!

I’ve been following this since it started and I’m surprised by how successful it has been thus far. For those of you new to the website, the guy who is running it started off with oneuglydomain.net hoping to trade it for another more valuable domain name. It is his aim to continue trading names until he has found one worth $1 million.

He started off by trading oneuglydomain.net for releaseparty.com. That was subsequently traded in for celebrityaffairs.com which is a pretty good name in my opinion. It’s coming on leaps and bounds at the moment but I have my doubts over whether the idea can sustain the pace. God knows how long it’ll take until he’s found one worth $1 million, presuming that it even happens.

I was tempted at the start to submit a few of my own domain names – but I just didn’t get around to it. It would have been nice to have been part of history…..mwahahah!

Now – I think it’s about time I came up with an idea to easily make $1 million. Anyone have any ideas? I swear I’ll give you a cut of the proceeds! Any takers? Anyone?!?! It was worth a try.