At a time where flat is the new up it seems hard to believe that anyone could expect to sell anything for 10x, 20x or more than their initial purchase price – but in the domaining world, that't not all too hard. Domain names are relatively small investments – on average we hand reg our domains for under $10. Turning that $10 into $100 or even $1000 might not be quite as hard as you think.
I was initially thinking of having the words "Domain Flipping" in this post since oftentimes that's what this would be described as. I then realized that Domain Flipping brings-up so many different definitions in everyone's mind that it might steer people away from the true subject of this post.
Call yourself a domain flipper, call yourself a Domainer, call yourself a domain investor, knomenclature does not matter – it's all about growing your investments. In this post I'll outline exactly how my company was able to actively grow our investments last year. I always learn the best from example so I'll start with a great example from 2008 – StimulusCheck.us.
This particular domain website was built in June, in just about an hour. It went on to generate over 2,200 visitors in just half a year. If you look at the breakdown shown above it is very clear that not a single dollar needs to be spent on advertising.
We generate 82% of our traffic from search engines and if your sites don't have a breakdown similar to this – you have plenty of room to optimize. With any traditional business advertising costs have always been essential to promoting and growing your business.
With every domain we develop our primary goal is to determine how we can generate traffic to our domain without having to spend any money on advertising. While it only took an hour to design this site – it was following the right process that allows for our success. So how can you do it yourself?
First – spend 5-10 minutes researching your domain name topic. If you domain is has the words fresh and flowers in it the pull-up the wikipedia entry on flowers. Read through it, get a good general understanding and then head over to WordTracker. This is an incredible tool that lets you determine how popular your keywords are, as well as related keywords. It is these related keywords that can help you make content that will indexwell with search engines. This is because the more "relevant" your content is, the higher it will rank in search engines like Google.
Using my example of a fresh flowers website I might find that when people search for flowers they most often look also for "roses" and "flower delivery" – this should guide me to then create two additional pages about each of these topics. You don't have to write a million pages, a few good paragraphs will get the job done.
If you aren't much of a writer yourself you can always find talented content writers on services like DNForum that will charge a small fee to write quality content for you. The key idea here is that you can generate strong traffic to your domains without having to spend days building a full-blown website.
Of course, by now you have the burning question…how much revenue did the site generate? This site generated $77 in seven months yielding $11/month in passive income. Income-generating websites sell on-average at 27x earnings which would yield around $300 for this site – all for an hour's work and a $10 reg fee – not bad!
This is only the first step in our long-term flips – after a year we will develop a full-scale site onto this domain and grow the revenue from $11/month up to $50/month – yielding a final expected sale price of $1,350 or more.
I know this post is a bit basic for some of my readers however the goal of this blog is education. There are times where I want to make sure we're all on the same page and that everyone understands my methdology for growing domain name investment. In the end, my goal is to provide free information that anyone can use to make money with domain names.
Happy 2009! Thanks for reading, and of course – Happy Flipping!
my site http://www.troubled-asset-relief-program.net is a similar story to StimulusCheck.us, but it doesn’t have the same sort of resale value because the name is a 4 word hyphenated dot net, but the dollars I get each month aren’t as ugly as the domain name!
– Page Rank: No.2 after just 4 months live
– Google SERP: Page One, Rank 6
– Traffic: 99% search engine organic traffic, average of 40 people per day
I am happy to answer questions about the domain via info@troubled-asset-relief-program.net