Wanted: Domain Appraisal Considering leasing a domain - scottishrealestate.co.uk

[melat0nin]

Hi all

I've been reading about domain leasing on Self Made Minds (http://selfmademinds.com/200708/domain-leasing-become-an-internet-landlord/) and I thought I might try and give it a go with one of my domains, scottishrealestate.co.uk

At present the domain has a minisite on it, and gets around 200 UVs per month. It earns about £10 per month from Adsense.

I think the traffic has great potential, because at the moment the domain seems to have a weird relationship with Google -- one week it's top 5 for 'scottish real estate' in SERPs, another week it seems to be out of the index altogether.

Obviously if I could keep it on page 1 in Google for those terms, I might have something which is attractive to a potential lessee.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get the thing to stick in Google? Or should I just try and lease it anyway in its current state?

I think with the current housing market and the fact that Scottish homes are generally cheaper than their English/Welsh counterparts (which is the reason I registered the domain in the first place), it might be of value.

Any thoughts appreciated

 

[ScottJ]

In my experience a new site can take the best part of a year to stabilize in Google, if you build some good backlinks then in year 2 it should be much more stable and then more leasable,

I have a good amount of sites maturing with this in mind and from the end of this year onwards would hope to be really stepping up my leasing income from £575 per month at present to £2k a month during '09

If some of my rankings were more stable I would already be generating just under £1k a month but alas 2 domains disappeared just as an agreement was reached, still I would rather they were stable before leasing them out.

 

[suzi]

it should be much more stable and then more leasable,

Don't the people / companies that lease the domain from you put their own content on to it?

Doesn't that then determine its Google position? And doesn't that make all your hard work and patience something of a wasted effort?

Is it all just to give them lessee a good start when they take over?

Suzi

 

[ScottJ]

Yes companies put on their own content however i.m.o. 80% of the ability to rank is offsite, so it gives them a good start and even thought the content changed my first lease done in Nov '07 remains in the top 10.

 

[melat0nin]

Yes I think I'll wait a while and try and stabilise the ranking. I've got a feeling it could be valuable in today's volatile property market, so fingers crossed.

 

[newbie]

hi everyone,

this is a very interesting idea - looks like I have a project for the next 12 months.

how would you work out how much a domain name lease would be worth on a monthly basis?

for instance,

for the keywords "cheap web hosting" and "cheap hosting", how much would a top 5 ranking in Google. MSN and Yahoo make this domain worth per month?

regards,

Newb.

 

[ScottJ]

Well if you ranked in the top 5 you could monetise through Adsense for an idea, last year I had a top 10 ranking and it was generating around £300 per month ($600) so when decided that leasing would be a good route it had to be at least what I was making taking into account that the lease would be 2-3 years and no increase but having the steady fixed amount is attractive especially with adsense falling of late, I decided upon £500 per month and that worked fine.

So try and monetise it yourself for a month or two and use that as a lower end starting point.