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

Monetise the domain

So we’ve finally got to the fun part. This is great for me after writing for 3 days creating 11 pages and over 4,000 words which I’ll have to edit down to so much less!

Okay so you have some options here, I’m going to start first up with parking.

Parking your domain for cash is a simple and effective way of monetising your domain, it’s really simple and there’s lots of options.

When you park a domain with a company, they put a generic page on your domain that’s full of links and most of the time a search box all of which earns money. The generic page is based on a template, you can usually choose a template you like and that’s really about it, the rest is up to your traffic. The more traffic you have going to the domain, the more links that searches that are going to get done and the more money you can make.

This is sedo’s example of a parked domain.

To get started the first thing you need to do is work out who you’re going to use to park your domain.

Here’s my list of domain parking companies:

• Sedo.com
• NameDrive.com
• Parked.com
• Godaddy.com
• iMonetize.com
• ActiveAudience.com
• Google.com
• DomainSponsor.com

They all have pros and cons, for example Godaddy take 40% unless you pay a $9.99 a month membership, and if you do they only take 20%. NameDrive are one of the better ones out there, they have really good looking landing pages, one of the bigger programs out there is DomainSponsor.com, they take 50% of revenue but they ‘auto-optimise’ the templates to place the better performing keywords in better positions.

The best thing to do is to I find is to sign up to just about off of them, rotate the domain around to a few different ones and see how it goes, stick with the one that’s converting well and paying out well.

If you don’t want to give away a percentage of the click profits to a 3^rd party you could always sell the traffic going to the domain, or sell ads on the domain yourself.

This is a common practice, since the domain has traffic going to it you can redirect all that traffic direct to someone else for a price per thousand or you could just build your own landing page and put some Google AdSense ads on it.

Typically if you’re going to redirect the traffic, you will need to know what type of traffic the site is getting, if the domain is legal-help.com, then it’s obvious, you’re getting people who are after legal help, so you could advertise in forums that you have legal help traffic for sale. This has the potential to be high yield since its targeted traffic for the buyer, otherwise if you don’t know what the traffic is, for example the domain is aaaupdown.com then you’re going to have a hard time selling whatever traffic it’s getting – you’re better off parking it.

If your domain has a good search engine result it might be worth building a few pages on the site relative to the search listing, make the pages very search engine friendly and add some Google ads – or sell the some links on the site and you might be lucky enough to retain the search listing and all the search traffic from it.

If you’ve bought a dropped domain Google’s pretty quick on killing any search listing it would have had, so don’t count on there being any long term search traffic.

You’re other option to monetising the domain is to send the traffic to an affiliate program, again this will only work if you know what kind of traffic you’re getting and the same applies above, either redirect the domain to your affiliate link, or build a page dedicated to selling the users on that affiliate program.

Something I like doing is redirecting traffic to multiple affiliate programs depending where they are from. For example I use a GEO-IP script to work out if the traffic is American, if so I’ll send them to an American express affiliate program, if the traffic is from China; I’ll send them to a Chinese affiliate program. This strategy can pay off at times if you’re redirecting people to sites that are in their local language rather to some generic English website.