Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Aside from the obvious way of not redirecting them to a site that has some sort of advertising where you get a piece of the action there’s also another way to make sure you don’t make money from domain names.

It’s called “Forgetting to renew your domain names!”

That’s right, I had a domain name that was pulling in $5-$10 a month, clearly paying for it’s renewal fee and more importantly paying off the money that I had initially invested in the domain name when I bought it from a third party. And I had put off those emails from GoDaddy reminding me that I needed to directly renew this domain because it wasn’t able to be auto renewed.

Then I went to check on the domain after noticing the expiration date had passed and it wasn’t there. At first I could have swore I tried to renew the domain name, but I guess there was no such luck and I somehow let it slip through the cracks. I only ended up making back about 50% of what I had initially invested. Not a very good business move.

I’ll keep checking to see if I can blame it on GoDaddy but I don’t think I’ll be able to.

If you want to learn how to make money buying and selling domain names check out my 5 part series on domain located at: How to make money buying and selling domain names.

When I purchase domain names, they tend to be on a whim and I’m unsure how long I’ll want the domain name. Therefor, I usually only opt to register them for a year, and uncheck the auto-renew box. I don’t want to be stuck with a name a year from now that I bought because one night I thought it was going to make the next golden Blog.

I also buy typos and type-in names that I park. Most of these names have completely arbitrary renewal dates that I don’t even look at after I decide whether or not the renewal fee + purchase price makes the purchase a smart buy. I just add it to my Go Daddy account, change the name servers and forget about it.

Then every once in a while I’ll get an email from Go Daddy that says 90 days renewal notice, or 60, or 30, or 15, or 10, or 5,4,3,2,1, they never end. So I just delete and forget, knowing that I’ll eventually make it back to Go Daddy to check on the names and renew.

Well, the other day I remembered that a name I currently own throw Air Depth had sent me an email that I promptly deleted or filed away. Only problem was, I remembered that the notice said 5 days to renew and that was 20 days ago. Ug! It was a $80 domain name! Now that’s chump change to these big wig domainers but to small peanuts McGee over hear that’s a good portion of money that I could pay bloggers with.

So I quickly called AirDepth to see if I could recover the name. Low and behold it turns out they hold it for 30 days and allow me to renew within that time period. (probably if no one else wants it, who knows)

I renewed the name but learned a valuable lesson. The second you realize a domain is worth something to you, renew it for a couple of years. Worse that happens is you can fact in the cost when you sell the domain name.

Some of you may remember that I’ve gotten into the dreaded parking of sites as an experiment and a way to see if I can diversify my internet earnings. (See Blogging Pro’s most recent post on the need for internet entrepreneurs to diversify their internet holdings and businesses.)

I jumped into the parking of sites because it’s easy money. I buy my sites through forums like Namepros or DomainState from people who have already proven the particular name to be an earner. I try and buy for a reasonable earnings multiple, and then just add it to my NameDrive account and forget about it. To try and save face I’ll say that I don’t buy porn related names and I don’t use pop-ups, or put porn related ads on a non-porn domain name. I just put ads that are relevant to the typo or type-in that I bought and see where it goes.

Now you may remember in my Septemeber Earnings Report that I said I was seeing a lower than average Cost-per-Click (CPC) on my domains that I had parked with NameDrive. I hunted around the forums and even emailed NameDrive and everyone confirmed that, yes there were lower than average CPC for domains across the board. Well it seems as though the tables have turned and my earnings are back up! This is good news for me because, as I mentioned I was doing this as an experiment and was sweating it in those few months that earnings were down.

Now NameDrive told me that they had already contacted Google about the lower earnings and that they were working towards a solution. My assumption is that NameDrive aggregates it’s ads from Google and is allowed to display them in their own way as parked sites. So I did a little more searching and notice that a lot of people had lower adsense earnings around August September and October. It sort of makes sense that these would be lower advertising spending months with kids going back to school and all. We’ll just have to wait and see if this upward trend continues and I keep seeing more cash in my pocket from having sites sit there.

I’ve acquired a few domain names over the past year and need to lighten the load. I’m looking to get rid of a few before I have to renew them and thought I’d list them here and see if my readers have any interest in them. Some of them I just haven’t had time to develop but thought they would be good for those people looking for decent content site ideas.

All of the following are reg’d at GoDaddy.com and expire sometime between next month and next July.

DIGIPHOTOEDITING.com
BLOGREPRENEUR.com
FindAScribe.com
GuideToGolfClubs.info
YourGolfClubGuide.com
MMAFightingTechnique.com
ScribeHut.com
NESFanatic.com
NESFanatics.com
NESFans.com
SubmitAnything.com
SubmitTaxes.com
SubmitYourTaxes.com
SumbitMyTaxes.com

Send an email to me if you’re interested in any or all of these names. I’m looking to get whatever you’re offering so send over your offers. Best or first offers takes them. (That is if I get two or more offers during the same email check I’ll let the offerers know the best offer and allow bidding from there, but if you’re first during my email checks (several times a day) with no other offers it’s yours!)

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.

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.

33 Domain Names
3 blogs
1 niche content site
average about $0.20 a day in some type of income

The $0.20 a day earnings are promising but nothing to write home about. The domain names, well I’m not parking any of them with income stream sites so making money on those is non-existent. I have, however, learned a lot about blogging and website development in general. Enough I feel that I have given myself a good base to really jump into the online empire building world.

I have been hemming and hawing over the question “Is it too late to get into the online game?” My conclusion. Heck no. The amount internet users grows daily and with previously poverty stricken countries finding wealth that number shouldn’t slow down any time soon.

Therefore, over the next 3 weeks I am going to try and develop a base site layout that I can apply blogs to and build sites. My plan is to develop a quality CSS based blog layout and use wordpress to publish my blogs. Then I am going to develop a php based niche content site layout (as well as using CSS) and publish a few more of those. My goal is to have 5 more, in addition to the 3 blogs I keep now, within a month.

My goal is to streamline everything. Use one statistics package, an easily maintained blog publisher, easy to add content layout for niche sites, and a good promotional plan. I will have to schedule writing times everyday to write on each blog and update content based sites.

It will take some time to setup but I feel I have learned enough about building websites and maintaining them that if I execute a good plan I will be able to easily keep this many sites while working 9-5, running, playing golf, tennis, and being social. We’ll see.

Second website from the 12 sites in 12 months goal has been published.

Yesterday at 5:00 pm central standard time www.AlohaUpdate.com went online. The site is about living in Hawaii, Visiting Hawaii, and general information about the islands. As I have mentioned before I live on the island of Oahu with my girlfriend. We are both fairly active people and enjoy traveling. In the last year and a half we been to many places within the islands and have had many experiences and want to write about them and share out pictures.

We’ve swam with dolphins, hiked on lava fields, surfed Waikiki waves, snorkeled all over, and hiked a few mountains. This site actually accomplishes two tasks. For one we needed a place where we can keep our friends and family updated and jealous as to the adventures we are having. Hopefully if we write enough interesting things they will want to come and visit us. The second thing the site does is help accomplish my goal of 12 sites in 12 months goal.

My hope is that Aloha Update becomes very search engine friendly as I build the pictures and content of the site over the coming months. I have been told that people referred to sites through a search engine are the most likely to click through ads. If this is true, I figure people searching for things about Hawaii will find the Google AdSense ads very helpful. Within one hour of having the ads up on the net all but 2 were tailored to exactly what was on the page. Unlike my first site, this one, the ads make sense.

Another result that came from working on this content based website is that I am learning a lot about design and implementation. One of the most important things I’ve learned is to have a really good idea about the formatting for the site before you get into the coding, especially if you have multiple pages. I have been told the easiest way to format different portions of a site, if you don’t use php and stick with straight html, is to use include files. That way you change one file to make site wide changes. Next site I make this will probably be done, for now Aloha Update will continue to use CSS. To be more specific it was built using a modified CSS template from dreamweaver. I used the basic formatting idea and then hacked up the code.

All in all I would say the site is already a success. I have learned plenty and had fun writing about where we’ve been. If people visit, great. If they click through the ads, even better. We’ll keep updating it and see what happens. Now it’s on to the next site…