Domaining; The Easiest Game You Will Ever Play

domains

domains

For talk related to the actual art of “domaining” scroll down towards the end.

First I want to start off by saying that I am by no means an excellent domainer, hell, 99% of the domainers I’ve spoken to make more money than me. But then again, they have been in the domain industry since the early 2000’s where I on the other hand got into it just last year. Nevertheless, it’s putting food on my table and I’m quite content with that.

When I first put up this blog, I didn’t want to have it primarily focus on one subject or “niche”, I tried to expand my horizons and cover video gaming, website development, making money etc. However, I have found myself writing more and more “money” making articles as of late. This isn’t bad, but I will be writing more shortly and in shorter bursts as well.

Around the same time last year I was just getting into the online entreprenurial game for the same reason the majority of other people get into it. Money. However, that wasn’t actually my intention at all in the beginning. I just enjoyed making websites, reading about the tech, learning about search engine optimization. I’m proud to say I was a big noobie.

At first I focused my efforts on making “big bucks” with adsense. I had read stories of people housing money making empires completely on autopilot with the help of a few dozen websites and some google adsense code. I invested a few hundred dollars in PPC advertising and niche sites but realized that it wasn’t a profitable margin, well not for me at least.

See, I was searching for something MUCH easier, I’m a lazy man by nature and spending hours upon hours building websites, optimizing campaigns and altering my changes just wasn’t for me. That, and I wasn’t making any profit. : ) While I was experimenting with adsense I was hearing other stories where domains were being bought and sold for ridiculous amounts. So I figured I would get into it. After buying a few domains all of which I thought were “gold” at the time (one of which ended up having trademark issues) I decided domaining wasn’t for me.

So off I went again, back to making petty cash from adsense and a few sales here and there. It was somewhat depressing to be honest. Months past and my earnings began to increase as this blog became more popular, I was averaging around $150 from adsense per month, which is infact a joke to be honest (no offence to all you guys starting out). But again, those $150 went into developing more sites, increasing my knowledge flow and just experimenting with all areas of internet marketing. I started selling products and blog reviews on the DP Forums, which proved to be relatively successful.

At this point, sometime in October of 08 I think I was pulling in about $300 per month from reviews, sales and adsense. It wasn’t great but at least it was something. It was around this time that I got banned from DP forums for “bumping” too many threads, at the time I was really annoyed because it meant I was unable to sell anything and my reviews would come to a halt. I look back now and think that it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

As a result of being banned for a few months I decided I should explore domaining further so I joined at NamePros.com which is a domain discussion forum. I started to read and explore the market and started to understand why domains sold for what they did. I discovered a few sites that offered pretty good expired domain lists and started searching around for daily drops (domains that were deleted on that day and are available for registration).

The first actual profitable domain I bought was “CartridgePaper.com” which I registered for $7 at name.com. I sold this domain a week later for $24 in an auction at NP. I look back now and realize that it could have been worth so much more developed. This was the point that my domain lifestyle took off, I realized that profit could actually be made by buying and selling domains.

A lot of experts say that when you buy a domain, whatever it might be, you should develop it. I have come to realize that this could not be any more true. The first month after I sold CartridgePaper.com I started to buy a domain or two per week some would sell for profits others would not sell at all. I didn’t really get stressed though as I realized this was part of my learning curve.

Sometime around November 08 is when I found my calling and haven’t looked back since. Sure it may not be the most profitable aspect of domaining or even the smartest but it’s worked for me on over a 100 different domains since then. The secret is people LOVE domains that bring in traffic, even if it is a slight trickle it will instantly be worth more than a non traffic undeveloped domain.

I came upon this revelation when I was browsing the traffic domain sales section at NP and sedo. Even a stupid, non pronounceable domain would sell for a decent amount if it received any traffic or had previous revenue. This is around the time it hit me, I would create mini sites for all my domains slap up wordpress blogs, promote a little and let them sit there for a month or two.

After a month or two these domains/websites would start to get some steady traffic, some as much as 200 visitors per day after the first week (depending on the domain you buy of course). I decided it was time to start selling and I was amazed at how fast they were being sold. A domain I had purchased for $7 a mere month ago sold for $150 just because it had a “decent” name and had a steady flow of traffic.

I was surprised at how easy it was; I would purchase a domain for something like $8 and set up an optimized wordpress “website”, notice I didn’t say “blog” because I made it act like a static website. I got rid of all the unneccesary wordpress junk and just kept a simple layout and theme through all the sites. It would take me about an hour to completely set up a domain along and get it a few backlinks/trackbacks. I forgot to mention I would also throw about 5 PLR articles on it, they didn’t have to be unique either. After this I wouldn’t touch the site for about a month (other than check daily traffic stats).

I may buy about 10-20 domains in a month, which might cost me a maximum of $200 along with a maximum of 20 hours of work. If you divide that up, it’s less than an hour per day. And even so, I’m still on my pc for at least 8 hours a day so that one hour didn’t really effect me much at all.

I’ve been doing this ever since then and boy is it easy, I don’t need to worry about creating annoying HTML websites or placing google adsense code into each of my sites (I use the same wordpress theme throughout all my domains which has set up adsense blocks and all I have to do is enter my code once and it will be reflected into all the domains) or even managing PPC campaigns, the formula is pretty much set in stone. Just rinse and repeat.

My method is fairly simple and brings in some decent income but of course it has the potential to earn so much more. By following the market, trends and world events you can get a lead on the domain game and I recommend you all do this. Talk to others like yourself as much as you can, watch the news, read blogs. Make your own predictions, who cares if you’re wrong it’s only $8 (for reg) but if you’re right you may never have to work again. But ALWAYS stick with dot com, it’s the easiest, safest and most recognizable extension which also of course receives the most type in (direct navigation) traffic. Dot nets and Dot orgs are good but only if the domain fits the extension and is actually a jewl. Otherwise, there’s no point.

I think the important lesson that should be taken away from all this is to expand your horizons, sure domaining is easy but if something better comes along will I not take it? Of course I will and you should as well. Although domains are currently my primary focus I haven’t given up on adsense nor have I on selling things, writing reviews, private advertising and marketing in general.

For those of you who are interested I earn upwards of $3000 per month now and I predict this figure to keep increasing over the next few months and years. Thanks for reading and I hope you guys took something away from all this.

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