Acquiring Revenue Domain Names On The Cheap - Part One
November 30, 2007
Owning revenue generating domain names can make or break those just getting into domaining. This three part series explores a method I have used to acquire these types of names cheaply.
Revenue Domains - How I Developed This System:
In April of 2007 I began playing with expired domain names, at the time my earnings were at an all time low (I have been a full time entrepreneur since about 2002). I really needed to figure out how to get some additional cash coming in or it was going to be burger flipping time, and that my friends was not about to happen.
I asked myself, what are some of the most successful money making decisions I had made over the last few years? What has worked in the past and can possibly work now?
The answer I came up with was two fold:
- I had purchased several expired domain names years earlier which did fairly well in the search engines and allowed me to monetize via Adsense.
- I had also purchased a website from someone via ebay – the cost was $1000. Not cheap but I knew in time I could make that money back with the site. While it took a while for me to see the return on the purchased website from ebay the site did go profitable, and to this day still makes me money.
- Income From Website Purchased Off Ebay
- Adsense earnings since May 1 of 2007 till today (November 28): $335.38
- Ebay Earnings Since Early Summer 2007: $843.94
- Total time working on site: between 2 and 3 hours this year
The expired domains were interesting, some ranked well and traffic flowed nicely (and I made money) while others crashed and burned. However I could usually find expired domain names cheaper, so I proceeded to research names that were dropping and started to pick up some of these names in the spring. Some of the domains I used BANS and did great straight away, they paid for them self within weeks. Other sites I set up wordpress, and created unique content on the homepage with link in the “blogroll” to similar sites in the niche.
Its All About Getting Maxim Traffic & Earnings Out Of A Domain For As Long As Possible
It is important to understand were not picking up names with the intention of parking them, when you park a domain name you are not going to be able to enjoy long lasting search engine traffic. While some expired domain names *might* have old pages listed in the engines but within weeks or months those will soon drop out of the search engines and the traffic will disappear.
Instead we take a domain that already has the juice to rank well and we create mini sites that are content rich, sure ppc earnings might be slightly lower than a good parked page but the traffic the domain will receive over time will eclipse this and will usually far out earn a parked page.
It is all about traffic > And Monetizing that traffic easily and effectively.
I then would usually *try* to forget about the domains and would work on other sites I already had working for me. This can be the tough part as you want to see impressive stats right away. However often times it takes a while for the new content to get indexed across all the major search engines. So I kept researching expired names and looking for bargains that enough moxie to rank well in the future.
This part is important – I am not concerned with “pure domain value” but rather aspects the expired domain name has such as:
- Quality links point in from other topically related sites
- A decent amount of history online (read old stable site with only one drop)
- Links from Yahoo directory and DMOZ are not uncommon and I have plenty of them
After I had done a few of these sites I started to see patterns and was able to create a formula that works probably 75%
It is also important to understand the rules of making this work:
- You MUST make the new site the same exact subject matter as the previous site
- You MUST create unique content that is not available else where
- You MUST have proper onpage seo in place
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Outbound links that are on topic
- Light fast loading site with few images
- Smart internal linking (stop using that dam word “Home” in your link nav, unless your like me and your using a “no follow tag”
After getting the new site set up I would let them sit to see how Google reacted to the sites, what is nice here is that were not talking black hat or even gray hat here. Were talking about creating useful content for readers, and were linking to other notable sites within the niche. Nothing shady about this practice at all.
Sure enough after several weeks I noticed some of these domains got pretty good rankings in Google, and the money began to flow. Not a lot mind you, maybe a buck a day. But remember that is only from one page of content, more importantly we know that the site is doing fairly well in the search engines and is making money.
The next step is the to ramp it up, research the niche, find out what people are searching for. Find out what advertisers within the niche are paying for (in terms of traffic via Adwords and the content network – Adsense). In the coming days I will post how to take a site at this stage and double or even triple the incoming traffic and thus the site earnings.
To Your Success,
Brian J
This is about the stage I’m at.. I’m glad I read this..
I found your site through YouTube. Good work on the videos. They’re well organized and promote something that most domainers should do more of…. development!
-Bill