Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I just checked in on my domain names over at namedrive and noticed (kinda hard to miss) that they got a facelift. A new logo, a cleaner and a little brighter colorscheme and the most important part, they got some new layouts.

They got both single click and portal designs that look more like web pages rather than just parking pages. There’s a sidebar-two center ads-search-top bar- page that looks great and I’m going to try it for some of my domains that get less than 20% CTR and see how they go. If my CTR (click through rate) increases significantly I’m going to slowly transfer my domains over to new templates.

Check them out if you don’t use them, I get OK payout rates, I know there’s better out there but a lot of those are tough to get into, like fabulous.

Are you a computer programmer in need of a senior thesis for the upcomming year? I know most people probably already picked theirs long ago and are going to write some great program for a Palm Pilot to control your Tivo from zimbabwe. What use is that? Maybe to Britney Spears of Angelina Jolie, but not the rest of civilization.

Why not do something useful?

If I had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of spare people around me (such as a college campus), and I could find a professor willing to use senior funding to pay said students, or had enough money to tell my professor to piss off and do it anyway than this is what I would do.

I would make a program based on data collected from at least 500 participants typing a representative list of words (probably at least 500 different words and phrases) over and over again. From the lists these people create I would then run some statistical analysis on the results. The data/results could be reduced to split up left and right hand as well as those letters close to one another. This would eliminate outliers like going to type an F when your pinky hits Q, or your right pinky hits [. From this one could then generate an easy alrogithm in which they looked at consectutive letters begin typed as well as location on the keyboard and give probabilities for mistyping. The results could easily be check against a new random sample and random list of words, and if the results were drasitcally different you could group the new results with the old results to get a new algorithm.

What could you use this for? For someone wanting to buy domain names that would generate a lot of typo/type-in traffic. Great internet tool.

If someone decides to do this let me know, I want first crack at seeing how it works with generating some good typos. I realize that more goes into finding a domain name with traffic and click through potential but would something like this be nice for the domaining community?

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.

Dave G over at Brighton Vibes has 27 domain names that he would like to sell to you. He had 29 but decided to develop one of the sites after someone inquired about the already developed site.

Some of the domains are:

hyundaisportsclub.com
hyundaisportsclub.net
new-york-city-accident-lawyers.com
pet-urine-removal.com
phentermine-directory.com
rightpad.com
searchgrub.com
stuffthatglows.com

The hyundaisportsclub.com is already developed and has a forum and everything on it. If I knew the first things about cars past the 80’s I might think about that one and snatch it up right away. Plus Google says it has 176 pages indexed from the site already.

Check em’ out.

Ever typed in a domain name cold turkey wondering where it will lead to? I have and supposedly thousands upon thousands of people do it everyday. When you’ve type in one of these common everyday used words you have probably ended up at some site resembling a normal search results page like that from Google or Yahoo. What you might not know is that all the links on those pages are paid advertisers going through a central advertising agency. The type of traffic these websites make money from is mainly type-in traffic like I just explained.

Like real estate domain state is all about location. A good type-in domain name can be like having a pizza joint on the main road through a college campus. That company could make the worst pizza around but they still manage to make some money by offering the service at the right location. Words like candy and cellphones can have huge amounts of traffic and be listed on page 3000 of Google. Having a huge network of links is also a bit like having a good location. Getting your links on high traffic sites can be difficult but if you do, just driving traffic to your site can be enough to make a few dollars a day on those that click through your ads. These ads are usually provided by hosting services like Sedo.com or Google’s DomainPark. They get all they advertisers, set up your page, and all you do is forward the domain to them. End of Month, Receive Check.

The more difficult way to increase the value of your domain name but having the most potential to earn income is to build a content rich site. Once you have people visiting through search engines you can add some ads here and there or use affiliate linking to generate click-through income. This last group would be more like your sky rise apartments, hotels, health clubs, or malls. The more revenue you can generate from providing one of these services the more the property is worth.

Ultimately you can keep your domain names and or content rich sites to earn a passive income stream. Or you can get in the market of buying and selling domain state just like a real estate developer would buy and sell properties. This is just what a growing number of people are doing. There are some out there who have domain portfolios which include over 300,000 domains names, with countless others having several thousand. (If you can’t find what you’re looking for at Netfirms or GoDaddy chances are one of these people has what you’re looking for. Sure they’ll part with it. For a price.) In an article published in Business 2.0 about domainers and specifically one domainer with a portfolio of 101 names. One of these was cellphones.com. A simple site parked not fancy graphics or content, just ads. It generated at the time $1300 a day average. His portfolio was purchased for $3.6 million. Yes, 3.6 million dollars. If the site keeps up, which undoubtedly it will, the purchasing company will be able to break even on just that site along in 8 years. Try that on 3.6 million dollar home, hotel, or mall property.

I currently own 15 domain names and am trying to grow my portfolio weekly. I am also developing some of the sites, this one included, while keeping track of any type in traffic should I plan to sell off the domains later. Most I will try and develop with content or services as I see this to be the most profitable long term passive income stream. I can reinvest whatever I make in other ventures as they arise. I will keep you posted as to my progress and any publishing of the sites I may do. One I will have up by the end of the month.

There are still many domain names out there and many more to come. Take for instance avian flu. Not even on the map before this year. Whoever snatched that domain name up is probably making a pretty penny as you read this article. As new words are developed so will follow type-in traffic. Don’t forget the developing of content rich or service providing sites that will make a name for themselves and become standard everyday lingo. Look at how well blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget are doing.

Who knew what a google was before Google came along?

If you liked this read you may also like:

How to Increase Traffic to your site within the first 2 weeks
Becoming a Millionaire
Wrap Text Around AdSense or Chitika ads