Ideal Development projects for earning money from domain names

in Domain Names Entrepreneurship Tech News by Francis Simisim — May 10, 2009 at 12:00 PM | 1 comment

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You’ve invested yourself great domain names, what’s next? Being a Domain name invester, it’s now time to earn money your domain names. There are several routes in doing so, one has an advantage over the other but has an effect over the investor’s capital and time. Aside from reselling, Here’s the list of possible ways to earn money from a domain name:

Parking

The easiest way in monetizing a domain name is thru parking, what you need to do is to change the name server to point to the parking website (for example, ns1.sedoparking.com is the name server to parking a domain name in Sedo). You then need to choose the right template (design) to display the advertisements (to encourage clicks on your parking). You also need to enter more keywords to optimize the webpage generated by the parking. The earnings are small, I personally got $0.02 per click (some reported around $0.50 per click). But it’s great for those with a large portfolio, it takes a few minutes to set up (if your name server points to it in a short time) and allows you to monetize straight away. It’s suitable for domain names that drive organic traffic (keyword rich domain names), as it needs constant surge of unique visitors as it is more of a one time visit for internet surfers (no relevant or useful content).

Affiliate Marketing

This is quite easy to set up for most people, all they set up is a landing page where visitors will land at once they visit your website. The landing page will consist of a few relevant contents and affiliate marketing links, which is relevant to the domain name. The content then leads or asks the user to click the affiliate link and to purchase something from the affiliate website. The earnings are apparently quite high (if effective) with this method, but it requires spending on advertising (often in PPC) to lead visitors in. Domain names can be irrelevant to the topic, but with trust issues with internet surfers seeing a weird domain name address, it’s best to stick to the topic. It is usually a one time visit as well, as it is repeat content for visiting users.

Mini Site

It’s a type of website that is designed to have several relevant contents (usually articles) and surrounded by a lot of advertisements. The content is not leading (but rather sorrounded for misclicks) to advertisement clicks, but is relevant to the domain name. The website is optimized with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to draw in visitors. The minisite is submitted to search engines and is left for a while (months to even years) before it starts earning. The earnings increase over website optimization and some of these websites earn a lot when correctly optimized. Repeat visits also doesn’t happen to often as contents are not updated much.

Directory

This is very common in the internet these days, it allows users to submit their company, website, blogs, etc. details to the directory. The directory is often popular for internet users that would like to optimize their website in search engines by creating more back links to their website. It’s usually slow to pick up as content is user generated and most users only come and submit content once. If the domain name is right on the topic then it might get optimized faster. Earnings are similar to Mini Sites as it picks up better search engine results then more traffic which means more revenue. There are a lot of free directory scripts online and is just redesigned to fit the website.

Blog

Probably one of the hardest ways to earn money (but easiest to setup) with your domain name, Blogs are updated by the owner that could be text, pictures or videos. The search engine optimization for this is also dependent on the content that the user updates and is the main driver for traffic to the website. It’s very time consuming as contents have to be original and relevant to the domain name, but visits are more regular once you do update the blog more. Earnings could be very high with this if more traffic gets to your blog. Popular platforms used are WordPress, TypePad and Blogger which are free to use.

Forums

Forums or bulletin boards was a very popular concept during the web 1.0 to 2.0 transition. It’s where people discuss, question, or ask for support on certain topics. It used to be easy to gain members to the website but as the forums continue to pop out, it suddenly becomes a hard task to sign-up or maintain interaction in the forum. It’s also gaining visitors from search engine optimization by placing topics to discuss that is relevant to the domain name. But like directories, it’s hard to get people to generate more content. Earnings in forums could be very high as long as you can maintain members from interacting in the website (contributing contents). The most popular platform is VBulletin which is a paid platform, however, there are also free ones like Simple Machine Forums and PhpBB.

Unique Concepts

This is probably the most expensive and most time consuming out of all the routes mentioned, but if successful, could be the biggest earner. By providing a unique concept that not a lot offers, it captures users to visit the website more. The website is usually built from ground up and is going to take a long time (one month if fast and can stretch to even years to build). With the web 2.0 movement, it is usually user generated content but some are also professionally added contents. Examples are Google, Twitter, Facebook etc.

These are some ways for a domain name to earn money, so investing in domain names really could give investors so many routes to earn money from it. I personally believe in domain name investment, it’s fun, exciting and challenging and I will continue to invest in it.

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