How To Profit From Domains

As promised in the article The Basics of Domain investing I am going ahead with this topic. It created some buzz which makes me think a lot of people are interested in non-conventional investing. (Which is great, because this is what I like to do and write about most).

Photo by streetart at Flickr

“The Basics” only covered how basically the domainers play the domain names game. Now it’s time to go into more details how you can do like them.

So if you find good domains or sites (how? in another article of course)

Parking Domains

The domain parking is useful for domains with type-in traffic. If your domain does not have type-in traffic, you’d better not park it. You have seen parked domains – you type in some domain name in your browser and instead of a real site you end up on a page with links and “search results”.

Parking is a lazy method to make money because it virtually takes no effort. You can use the services of a parking company or park the domain yourself if your hosting provider allows that.

Parking is an easy method, it’s not the best one. If you want better profits, try other method.

Flipping Domains

Domains are just an asset like any other and flipping them is like flipping stocks. You buy domains with good potential and try to sell them at a better price.

You can find domains for flipping at online markets like Sedo or Sitepoint, but the key to successful flipping is to find under-priced domains which can rarely happen there.

One strategy to find under-priced domains for flipping is to look at less popular domain trading markets, buy them and try to sell on more popular like the two said above.

Another (better) one is to flip registration fee domains – i.e. brainstorm for good domains which are free, register them and then sell.

Flipping can be a lot more advanced if you do it on working websites, not just on domains names. Finding under-priced sites is much easier though it’s riskier. You can find such sites in directories, by doing web search… it’s a large topic which, you guessed, will be covered in a different post.

Developing Domains

It’s actually developing websites for the domains you own. You need an idea and if you want it to be really investing, you need some money to purchase the development rather than doing it yourself.

A developed website can be kept as an asset for residual income or can be sold (flipped) to someone who is willing to pay a good price.

I won’t really talk about “how to make money online” as there are millions of guides about that. Just know that most these guides are crap and in most cases you’ll pay for nothing, so stay away from buying guides who promise to tell you how to make easy money online.

Developing websites is a like developing a business, in fact it is business itself. So don’t do it if you don’t have an USP/POD or at least a competitive idea.

Just a very short reference: your domains can be developed as content websites, online services, communities, blogs, e-shops etc. You can make money from ad revenue, access selling, selling other stuff, joint ventures, affiliate programs and more.

Spamming

Spamming means to use black-hat SEO to bring traffic to your parked or developed domain. Usually it’s done for advertising or affiliate revenue. I don’t recommend you do spamming not only because it’s illegal and unethical but also because it’s not a good business model. Therefore I am not going to write much about it.