African Domainers: Where are they?

It seems to me that 'domaining' is still an alien word in Africa. Beyond South Africa's Silicon Cape, it seems there are not many Africans involved in the business of buying, parking, developing and selling of domains.

There are several obstacles and barriers to entry. Key amongst them is pricing. There's a very popular but flawed argument in African ccTLD circles that "we keep prices high to finance our administrative expenses". Some African countries also have extra burdening regulations like requiring users to develop domains within two or three months of acquiring domain names; requiring users to buy hosting packages as prerequisite for buying domain names and so on. So many unnecessary rules and lack of understanding of the commercial side of domain business inevitably locks out thousands of potential investors and internet entrepreneurs leaving African ccTLDs with archaic registries that are a burden to governments and are run like government departments. Innovation in the domain name system will definitely put things right in this industry from next year.


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Domain Monetization: Which is the best way to monetize your Domains and Content

African Domain Names: Domain Monetization

I will give some tips to those African domainers out there still figuring out how to monetize  their domains. I have been battling this question ever since my new site started picking up traffic from Google. What is the best way to monetize your development work? Maybe you have invested a month or three months building the foundations of your e-real estates: you have done the link building, SEO optimized content, you have submitted your URL to multiple search engines and directories, you have emailed 50 webmasters informing them about your content ad exchanging links. In short, you have done your part, so where is the money?

There are several ways to monetize your domains after the development work is finished. I will just list some of them and explain my experience(or lack of it) on each of the domain monetization strategies:

Domain monetization strategies:
-Adsense Contextual Ads
-Sell Products
-Affiliate Programs
-Ad Sales
-Conditional Advertising
-Lead generation

If you are going to make some gold off your sweat after months of domain development and content optinization, then you must at least employ one of these strategies.

Adsense: I will begin with the good old Adsense, it's the simplest and also the lowest paying of these methods. If you have no clue about the rest, I suggest you begin with Adsense as you figure out the rest. My website has been generating an average 1EUR daily or 30EUR per month. Which is quite substantial given that parking the domain generated $0 for one month! Adsense will not make you rich but at least you don't have to dig into your pockets to finance you domain business.

Ad Sales: Sell ads directly to advertisers. Just build a simple brochure with your websites unique visitors per month and number of page views and email to advertisers and companies in your niche. You might just scoop a nice ads deal!

Affiliate Programs: get paid a commission when your readers perform an action or buy something from another site.  This is amongst the best paying and the hardest as the user has to perform an action, buying products for you to earn. This performs well in the US ad Europe but as you know, most users in Africa still do not convert well in terms of making their purchases online on seeing a banner. So this is is tough.

Sell Your Products and Services: This is the hardest of all but also the most rewarding. Your site will act as a shop where users come to window shop for products and make their purchases. But if you know what you are doing, you can quickly make money. If you are an insurance salesman, you can build a regularly updated website targetted at African clientele and write about insurance products, explaining the intricacies, interest rates etc and leave your contacts for readers interested in acquiring insurance to contact you and then you earn your commission from the insurance company. You can also display products from third websites and earn profits from the sales. In the US, e-commerce websites deploy a model called drop-shipping whereby the online retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. Not the best way to cultivate customer loyalty but if  you sell what people want then you can make a good profit with this.

Lead Generation: Lead generation is the process of converting every visitor to your website into a useful and potential business lead. You can partner with a company(s) in a  particular niche say insurance companies in Johannesburg, then create a SignUp form on your home page where visitors can sign up and enter info about their insurance requirements. You can then sell this info to insurance companies at even $5 per lead. If you can get 5 daily inquiries, then that's $25 per day for you!!! For doing "nothing". The insurance companies pays you after verifying the lead is authentic.  If the insurance companies can pitch well to this potential customer, the insurance companies gets added business at a very small cost. Read more and learn about the various techniques of lead generation.

For now, am using Adsense and Affiliate marketing; Adsense is bringing some earnings but I will give  the Affiliate ads some time to convert. Any more ideas on website monetization? Drop them below and let us know.

Domainers in Africa: Garvin Durni

Africa needs some inspirational stories on domaining success; the attitude so far has been that of domaining is a Western business, the internet dynamics in Africa are not sufficient to sustain the "sophisticated" domaining industry. Very few African ccTLDs make it to the domain aftermarkets apart from South Africa's .co.za. This means that businesses in Africa still have not grasped the value of domain names in e-marketing/e-commerce, in lowering your adwords campaign budgets and the effort and budgets you put in SEO, in giving you very quality and relevant traffic almost from nowhere!

Gavin Durni

 There are people in Africa who have built successful domaining businesses and this week I will profile a guy from South Africa, Gavin Durni. South Africa is always a country of great inspiration. It brings the feeling of possibility, it's possible! As the brand campaign says. If it can be done in the developed world, then it can be done in South Africa; if it can be done in South Africa then it can be done in the rest of Africa.Simple as that. It's possible. Gavin Durni has built a successful domaining business down South specializing in the .co.za namespace. His company Durni Companies LLC was formed in 2006 and its internet operations specialize in monetizing direct navigation traffic from domain name portfolios by means of pay-per-click advertising. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, in 2010, Gavin sold fly.co.za for $65,000, the biggest .co.za sale ever reported. he has also wrapped up some 5 figure domain sales in .co.za

Gavin's specialties are in domain name monetization, domain name acquisition, SEO, web development, e-commerce, PPC advertising, Adwords Campaign Management and Conversion Tracking according to his Linked In Profile, skills, many will tell you, are requisite for a successful domaining business.

Durni Companies,LLC is one of the biggest players in the .co.za domains in South Africa. It's important to note that Durni has focused on the .co.za domains instead of the beaten path of the .coms. This could be due to the stature of the .co.za whose value has been on the rise in the last few years and the availability of generic domain names that were still available in the .co.za domains. They are also quite cheap and can be acquired for as low as $10 unlike other African ccTLDs with the 'ridiculosity' of their prices, regulations and restrictions. It's impractical for African Domainers to for example build successful domaining businesses around domains that cost upwards of $90 per domain, that's ridiculous!

"Domain name registration is a leading indicator in terms of internet economy growth of a registry. These are all very attractive factors when it comes to domain development and acquisition; it is actually becoming very difficult to buy premium domains for good prices which is a direct indication of supply and demand. This has also attracted many speculators to the market, as well as international venture capital money to start up internet businesses in South Africa.” Durni said in an earlier interview with mybroadband.co.za

“Most domain research and selection is based on keyword research and keyword value, which is based on factors such as local search volume and the industry the keyword or domain name pertains to.” Durni said that they monetize their domain names by selling advertising on them as well as developing them into websites and partnering with others to create businesses.

“The real value being the SEO and the ability to rank quickly in search engine rankings to reduce pay-per-click and other online advertising budgets. Once websites have been developed, we either continue to run these as businesses or sell them off.” he said.

Durni's Advice: “Having a very specific search term pertaining to your business is essential to SEO, which leads to more traffic, more leads, more sales, and thus more business.”

I think Durni's example should be  a good case study for building successful business in the domain industry although my heart goes to those aspiring African domainers living in countries with stupid ccTLD regimes, countries I will not mention for now. But there is a lot of promise in the Kenyan ccTLD market, if only KENIC could lower the prices of the .co.ke a little bit! Kenyans owning those generic keyword domain names should also consider parking or listing those domains on Sedo, you never know who might approach you with the offer of a lifetime. Nigeria also looks good as well as Somalia's .SO although it's relatively new and might take some few years before search engines build some trust in the ccTLD. South Africans are much better placed to build successful domaining businesses but watch out for Kenya; it will be Africa's next rising star! Another future option will be the dotafrica Domain that's being led by DotConnectAfrica, which will be a domain name for the entire African continent.

Next week, I will profile more Africans who have built successful domaining businesses.

Domain Parking Does not Work, Start Developing your Domains

If you are not part of the "Domain Elite" you probably know what am talking about; you just started domaining, hand-registered some "great" domains that you found through services like Value Drops and quickly parked your domain name on Sedo. After two months of waiting patiently, you realize that your domain just had 17 hits and zero clicks! What!! How will you even break even and recover the $7.49 you spent on GoDaddy buying your domains? You realize you are headed for some serious losses.

The truth is that you won't. Domain Parking is dead. There is a small group of domainers who earn good cash parking their domains but it's a very small and exclusive group and they were the early birds; and the great sales you see, it's almost exclusively amongst themselves. So is domaining closed to the newbies? Not at all. There's a plan B, but you must be willing to put in tremendous effort to realize it.

Plan B is developing your domain names. It's tough but very rewarding. You have to work your ass off in the first 6 months in order to build a sustainable income. If you can generate 1000 unique and useful articles per month in the first 6 months in a particular niche without repeating yourself often, then you are en route to a sustainable online income. Build and they will come. Write short and useful articles optimized for a keyword of your choice. Promote your articles on social media, submit your url to search engines, do a lot of link building, at least 10 links per day and you are headed for financial independence. The gold is there for the taking but you must be willing to bear the long trek. In online ventures, there are no get rich quick schemes, build and they will inevitably come!

African Domain Names: Get Africa Domaining

Domaining is still an unheard of business in Africa, at least South Africa. A few days ago, I suggested an idea on creating a domain aftermarket to market African ccTLD domain names. A lot of African sit on gold, that's they own great, superb domains that could bring in loads of type-in traffic but they don't have ideas on how to monetize or develop those domains.

South Africa has built a wonderful domain industry that can serve as an example to other African countries. Every week, a .co.za domain is sold on Sedo for four figure dollar values. I think Africans need to learn to trust their ccTLD and then the African ccTLD registries needs to rise to people's expectations by offering domains that are affordable and policies and regulations that are user friendly. The monopolies should be dismantled to allow for healthy competition in the industry.

It looks like Kenya might follow on South Africa and build up its fledgling domaining industry. Nigeria too looks promising but the rest of Africa is still clueless. But there are several hindrances to domaining in Africa from the prohibitive prices to the abuse and fraud experiences in some ccTLDs like Zambia's .zm where the operator Zamnet has been involved in systematic abuse, an issue that we will discuss in a future post on the blog.

For the rest of Africa, it's best to invest your efforts in the gTLD sphere, buy .com domains, they are the top of the range in the market and they are also cheap. With GoDaddy's periodic promos, you could buy domains for as low as $1 and then go ahead and break even in less than two weeks. The rest is just profits. Africa, please get domaining, don't miss out on the opportunities of the worldwide web!

If you need help starting your domaining business in Africa, please get in touch at africadomainnames@gmail.com or via Twitter @AfricaDomains

A Domain Aftermarket for Africa?

I was just going through Sedo's weekly top sales figures and was pleased to see some .co.za domain names amongst the top 10 domain name sales, probably the only African ccTLD that makes into into international domain marketplace.

It seems to me that South Africans have a deep respect for the .za namespace and given choice, they will choose a .co.za over even .com domain names if sales figures are anything to go by. I also think it's time Nigeris's nifty .ng domain names entered the domain aftermarket due to their universal appeal. Why don't we set up an African Domain Aftermarket or country domain aftermarkets, at least in those countries that are seeing a boom in the domain name sales?

Three countries come to mind: South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. These are countries that I believe are experiencing and will continue to experience good internet growth in the future. There are people in these countries holding some high value domain names and there are people in need of those domain names. Since domaining is relatively new in Africa, people are not very familiar with the international domain marketplaces, why not create a local Aftermarket(s) to bring seller and buyer together? Am sure it would stimulate a very nice domain sales channel, especially for those dormant great African ccTLD domains! Food for thought!

ValueDrops: Pick some high value dropping/expiring domain names

While many domainers and domain owners hold on to high value domains that bring in high type-in traffic and great revenue, there are still thousands, 60,000 to be precise, domain names that drop every day. Amongst these are very high value superb quality domain names that will give you an instant boost in your domaining ventures.

ValueDrops.com is a website that specializes in picking some of the best quality dropping domain names; if you are relatively new domainer, this would be agreat place to begin your pickings instead of imagining names that you think sound fine or you feel might be popular. Once advise, try to preorder the domain names as most of them are captured the instant they drop. So when you are hand-registering, I don't think you stand a chance. Happy domaining!!!

New Domainers: Forget Domain parking, nothing awaits you but heartbreak

I am what seasoned domainers call a newbie but I have learnt a few tricks in the book in my last few months of domaining. For one, I am earning my money from my domains even though the earnings are quite low. I still create some of the content on my own although I hired a very creative lady who's so prolific that I am running out of cash to pay her.

Since all of my 18 domain names cost my an average of $7, GoDaddy had some incredible offers in the last few months including $1 domains!! Thank you GoDaddy. the $1 domain has already earned me 0.50 EUR in the last one month, so am almost breaking even. My aim is to break even in most of the domain portfolios within two months and then chase the profits. I can make a "profit" if I exclude the amount of work i do personally to develop and monetize those minisites and blogs I have hosted on the domains.

My first experience was to see if domain parking works for new domainers; believe me, it doesn't. In domaining, the early bird catches the worm and never lets go! So if you are late the best worms are probably taken. The idea of type-in traffic is a vestige of the old world..those who acquired the best domains some 5 to 20 years ago. For us latecomers, we must earn that elusive traffic through compelling content and hours of painstaking development work. Good luck! Anyone with a killer African domain name making some cash? Please let us know!