by Das Brain
Now getting back to the topic of making money on the internet. If are a newbie to internet businesses and you are thinking of registering domain names for the purpose of domain parking or buying / selling domain names this post or article is a must read. This post is basically a detailed story of my own experience with buying and selling domain names, including my big mistakes and what NOT to do when registering domain names.
After working for about 5 months at my last job which was the internet registrar company (I will reveal the name of the company within a few months) I began to hear my co-workers talk about domain name registration, domain name parking, domain name monetization, keyword rich domains and pay per click. Then there was talk about how much money there is to be made from buying or registering keyword rich domain names and either selling them or parking them.
After being immersed in these conversations going around me for a few months, I decided to do a little research, then decided to dive into this. Except my mistake was I didn’t know exactly what or how to register domain names that will be marketable for sale or domain names that will get a lot of type-in traffic. To me this was an opportunity to finally have a start on building my own business on the side, so I went full force into it……BIG MISTAKE!
I started registering names off the top of my head without giving much thought to keywords. This went on for a month, and I registered about 30 domain names mainly .com and .net. Crappy names such as mattmcconaughey.net, allthewebdeals.com, allthewebbargains.com, cellphoneacutioneer.com and cpubargains.com. Looking at the last 2 domain names you may think they are pretty good, but the reality is they are crap.
Let’s take cpubargains.com for example. It is a 2 word domain name which is good. It is a .com TLD is is very good, but from a domain parking perspective it SUCKS. The keywords are cpu and bargains and you have to ask yourself is there a lot of Google Adword or Yahoo Search marketing dollars around the keyword “cpu” and will this domain name get a lot of type-in traffic. The fact is that nobody will type in cpubargains.com in their browser bar and get to this site, so I can monetize the clicks of the advertisements displayed on it.
This type of domain name will only be worth something to someone who is looking to set up, design a complete multipage website or blog on it and fill it with very relevant content and SEO the site so it will get picked by the search engines to get organic traffic in order to monetize the website or blog. This type of set up requires extensive time and effort, trust me. For the domainer that just want to buy / register a domain name to park it to make money the lazy way or to turn around and sell it, the domain name cpubargains.com is not worth a whole lot nor is the other domains mentioned two paragraphs above.
As mentioned in my previous post everything about the internet business revolves around traffic (getting people to your website or blog), whether that is type-in traffic or organic search engine traffic, TRAFFIC is the most important word for an internet entrepreneur. After registering those domains above I parked the domain names with Sedo.com and NAMEDRIVE and I noticed weeks went by without getting much traffic or views and there was no clicks, so therefore no revenue was being made whatsoever. The traffic that were coming to those domain names were mainly search engine robots, not actual humans typing it in the browser. So basically all the above domain names and more turned out to be an expensive business lesson.
If you are registering or buying a domain name and you are going to build a full fledge website or blog on it, then type-in traffic and keywords may not mean as much to you, because more than likely you are going to make a brand of it, put marketing dollars behind it and as well learn and apply search engine optimization by reading books like The SEO Book to get organic search traffic to your site.
However, you plan to buy or register domain names for the purpose of domain parking or selling it, then you will need to pay special attention to keywords. After I realized what I was doing wrong which was not using a keyword tool like the one available from Yahoo Search marketing, I started to get better results. I started to register names that had keywords which internet users were looking for. I recommend using the Yahoo keyword tool to locate keyword combinations and try to register the keyword combinations with the most searches if they aren’t taken already.
For example the results for the keyword “business” from the Yahoo keyword tool, shows that the keyword combination “business card” has 139514 searches on it. You could try to register the domain name businesscard.com or businesscard.net or businesscard.??? If it is taken you move down the list, in the screen capture you see the next one is “betterbusinessbureau” with 136590 searches on it and you could try to register the domain name betterbusinessbureau.com, but that is probably already taken and is possibly trademarked. Anyway, you get the idea. Now almost all the good ones are taken by people like me and large domainer companies, but once in a while you may find something that actually has enough traffic to make some money from domain parking.
To this date I have registered about 350 domains and a good 100 of those domain names were garbage, 60 of those were great with pretty good traffic so I developed them into micro-sites ($130 per month revenue) and I parked the rest which are earning their keep which is the cost of registering one domain name from 1and1 and some of them I am still testing to see if they get enough traffic.
In conclusion, you can see that the domain speculation business is not an easy one. You have to find and test domain names which is time consuming and you also require to risk money to register them knowing that the domain names may not pay itself back in domain parking revenue and you have to take a loss. This type of business is not for everyone, but if done right it could pay back a good return on investment over time.
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