Making money from domains, what do I need to do?

1. Establish your budget
2. Search for domains within your budget
   1. Expired domains
   2. Registered domains
   3. Typo domains
3. Researching the domain
4. Purchasing the domain
5. Monetise the domain
   1. Parking
   2. Selling Traffic
   3. Affiliate Programs
6. Fast Start
7. Exit Strategy

Researching the domain

Okay so you’re now well equipped to find a domain, but once you’ve found one, then what? Research my friend; you need to know before you throw your money at a domain if it’s going to be worth it.

What makes it worth it? The value of a domain can vary on a few things, the age of the domain, if it’s a good type in name or if it’s ranked on a search engine (organic traffic that’s been around for a long time and will stay) or if the traffic is from links on other sites. There’s different risk associated with each, the search engine listing could drop, links could get deleted, anything could happen.

You find the more expensive names are the domains with lots of straight type in traffic, type in traffic tends to stay around for a long time and the domains are usually generic words, like income.com, career.com, hosting.com, hasselhoff.com – that kind of thing.

The defining factors for me are traffic, pagerank and DMOZ. To me it’s a 88% traffic, 10% pagerank and 2% DMOZ scale, if the traffic is high then I don’t care much about the other two, if the traffic is average but it has a good pagerank, like 4-5 or above, then I’ll still consider it, and if it has a DMOZ listing then yeah, maybe adds a little extra weight to my decision, but only if I’m going to build a website on the domain, if I’m going to park it to monetise it, then you’ll probably lose the DMOZ listing anyway so don’t worry about it.

Researching an expired domain is fairly easy, if you used the domain research tools in part 2 then you pretty much have all the information you need. The Alexa rank will give you an indication of the traffic; the domain tools give you the page rank and backlinks on all the major search engines. The big risk here is that the domain used to be attached to a website with keywords and all the rest, once you turn it into a money maker (parked page or something else) it’ll probably lose some rank and drop in search results.

Researching a registered or typo domain isn’t too hard either; if you’re buying from a forum get in contact with the person selling via a PM (personal message). Ask for some screenshots of where all the traffic is coming from (referral stats), aggregate traffic history (monthly traffic totals) and screenshots of revenue from the domain. For everything you request, try and get screenshots for more than 1 month, I try to get at least 3 to 6 months; I think it’s only fair when the seller is usually asking for 10-20 months of revenue for the domain.

You should also go and check the Alexa data, the domains pagerank and the number of backlinks for yourself.

If you’re buying from places like sedo, it’s a bit harder to get that history of traffic and revenue, all you have to rely on is the Alexa data, pagerank and backlink checker.

End of the day it all ready depends on what you’re planning on doing with the domain, take all the factors into consideration before you purchase.