Wednesday, August 17, 2011

My three months domaining Status Report and a few tips to the Domaining strugglers out there

I have been domaining for just three months now and today I would like to show you my domaining status report. I am mostly doing this as a hobby but this hobby might easily transition into a full blown business if I strike gold, a very good domain name that I can either develop or sell to kickstart a new domaining venture.

I have 18 domain names in my "portfolio", out of these, one is .co, 4 .info and 13 .coms/. Yes, always register .com domains!! My monthly income from my 18 domains is $15, generated mostly via minisites and Adsense for Domains. I only have one domain name parked on Sedo but it's earned nothing in the last two months that am thinking of developing it all together.

If all factors remain constant, it seems that my 18 domains will generate at least $200 in the next 9 months entirely from Google Adsense, just enough to break even and renew some of the .com domains and acquire new domains.  Breaking even is important in that it shields me from digging into my pockets more and more to fund my hobby. So my lowest goal in the first year is to ensure that at least each of all my domains make at least $10!! That's less than $1 per month!! Surely, everyone can make money online. But of course some of my new domains are doing much better than that.

The trick in this domain business, for a new comer, is to own at least 500 of these relatively well performing domains that you are likely to pick  from sites like ValueDrops.com and quickly put up content and monetize those minisites and full websites, if you have the time and ideas to develop multiple websites. A well optimized minisite will generate at least $5 in Adsense earnings per month, so some 100 of these should generate at least $500/month to start you off on your domaining businesses.

Given that .com domains cost $7.49 on GoDaddy, that will be an expenditure of $750 on domain acquisition or you can do it in bits like me and evaluate progress as you learn the ropes(much wiser). You can set up minisites quickly using Wordpress or Blogger by setting up Custom URL for free. And off you go...the hard part is the content. Add at least 50 well optimized articles on a particular niche per domain, submit the content to search engines and social bookmarking websites..it's loads of work! Once your site(s) is indexed and  your content has started picking up some traffic from Google, move onto the next domain(batch of domains) until all the domains in your portfolio are put into use. Remember, right now you are too broke to hire someone, so you can do this in your free time, mostly weekends.

A few more golden tips for new domainers:
  • Forget Parking: Earning from parking your hand-registered domains is a vestige of the bigone days and you are unlikely to chance upon a domain name with good type-in traffic. Parking hand-registered domains will bring you nothing but gloom and heartbreaks. There is a class of domainers who earn from parking, but you are 7 years late.
  • Do not imagine domains, use services like ValueDrops, Drop Day(10 day free trial), to register high value dropping domains: Always register aged high value domains that are dropping, so many websites offer these.
  • Choose names that are closely aligned to your niche, names that you could easily develop: Do not buy a domain name for which you have no clue what to do with..it's a waste of your precious cash. Buy domains that are related to your niche or interests.
  • Spend very little, in fact spend the disposable income that usually disappears in beer, and spend the time you use drinking beer on research and reading. Never spend too much, test the new market first and your level of endurance.
  • Be patient, very patient.

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