Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Cesar over at Flee The Cube has posted some early results from is domaining endeavours. He began acquiring names about 6 months ago and has stuck with the ups and downs of the business to produce some good results. He bought a lot of names, some as spelling mistake whims, some from forums and has recently switched parking services which boosted his returns and finally got a payout from his efforts.

Now as I said he has been through the ups and downs of the business, buying names that didn’t pan out, paying a premium for an existing name with traffic and loading up his portfolio of domains just to learn from the experience. As you can see it’s paying off for him. A word of caution though, it takes time, money, and some good ideas for words or phrases (harder than you think), but as you can see Cesar has done this an is reaping the rewards.

I previously wrote about domaining and what domain state is when I had thoughts of jumping into this form of online income source. I never really followed through with it because you need to get really lucky or invest a lot of time and money into the process of learning what works. I didn’t have a lot of money (still don’t) and seem to never have enough time for everything I want to do.

The basic gist of it is you own domain names that people more than likely type in to their web browser cold turkey. These can be misspelled domain names or popular words (like candy.com or cellphones.com) and then have a service park ads on that domain that you get payed a percentage of when people click through. The great thing about parking domain names is that once you have the names purchased and redirect your them to the parking company your choose, you do nothing. Completely passive income.

Now I say that last sentence with caution because I am unsure if people who are hardcore into the domaining business don’t do any promotion of their sites at all, I mean we have all seen them pop up in a Google search result before which is hard enough to do if you have a legitimate content site. But for the most part the income you would generate off of these sites is completely passive.

Reading Cesar’s post has made me re-think what I am doing with all the domains I have. I only have 33 domain names of which I am maintaining sites on 9 of the names, but the remaining 24 could easily be parked so that I make money rather than GoDaddy making the money with their parking.

With that I am going to sign up for a domain parking service and place domain names that I am not currently using with them so that I can try to earn an income from these names. There isn’t any harm in it. Doing so should only take a few minutes and who knows, maybe a few dollars will start rolling in. Every little bit counts, and I have to maximize the assets that I have.