Making a Domain earn £1 a week

[BREWSTERS]

The one factor in the whole of this is, the need for traffic. If your name or site gets traffic, the chances are it'll make money, no? If it doesn't get any, it won't.

So why not start with a name that gets some - even 50 uniques a month is a start. If you go to the expense of building a site on a name that'll never, ever, get a natural type-in, surely you're making things difficult from the start - especially if you are considering multiple sites.

Why not spend £10 or £20 getting an expired name that gets a handful of visitors? At least if your site bombs you can probably still sell the name...just my 2p

 

[BFTUK]

The one factor in the whole of this is, the need for traffic. If your name or site gets traffic, the chances are it'll make money, no? If it doesn't get any, it won't.

So why not start with a name that gets some - even 50 uniques a month is a start. If you go to the expense of building a site on a name that'll never, ever, get a natural type-in, surely you're making things difficult from the start - especially if you are considering multiple sites.

Why not spend £10 or £20 getting an expired name that gets a handful of visitors? At least if your site bombs you can probably still sell the name...just my 2p

Thats all well and good but you also need to consider the name.

I have a couple of vaguely typo / trademarked domains that get traffic, do well in the search engines for the companies names etc. But there is a ceiling as to how much traffic you can piggy back.

If you can afford a generic with type in thats great! I think your better with a more generic type name that can do well in the search engines, i see yesterday just bought something like coventrydentists.co.uk

 

[yesterday]

For me, ending up with a million is easy - I just start with 2 million and blow half of it!

Same with domains, if I wanted thousands of more revenue generating domains, I wouldn't start from where I am!

But - the point of this thread I think, is for those of us who have [stupidly/addictively/speculatively] (delete as appropriate) bought many, many domains that have turned out not to have very much type in traffic, to find a way of having them more than cover their costs.

Obviously the more I spend on content the harder it is to break even. Also I don't have the liberty of trawling the net manually promoting each domain. There are just too many.

So for this experiment to work, I can't go and individually promote this domain. I can only do to it what I'd be able to do with all of them together.

I am hoping the magic of unique content will do just enough to sometime in the next couple of years have a little burst of energy.

However, I may have to add more content relating more to higher search terms, like damp rather than moisture for example, but I am going to have to severely control costs if I am to repeat this over the whole portfolio.

There is no magic bullet I know, but I keep thinking that £xx per annum can't be that much to make from a domain!

Yes, I bought coventryflorists.co.uk from stevie, and is yet another experimental site to find that magic formula - uses mainly directory type content instead. No revenue yet, but it's only been a day . . .!!

yesterday

 

[BFTUK]

Good points yesterday.

I wonder if creating a hub site might be a good idea.

On this hub / portfolio site if you had a page with links off to pages about each individual site (so you get related links to each minisite!), you could spend a little time promoting that hub site and that in turn will feed good quality links to your mini sites.

Any thoughts on that Scott?

 

[BFTUK]

I've just put together a quick single pager at www.mildew.org.uk (Your Moisture domain gave me the idea yesterday! )

Had a friend of mine write up a nice unique article for me, will be interesting to see the progress.

I'm also working on a hub / portfolio site for my mini-sites you can see the work in progress at: www.mywebsiteonline.co.uk

 

[ScottJ]

Yeah a hub site would be a good move, a portfolio page to categories and link out from so that you can get the pages spidered and into google/msn/yahoo or if you have a large forum presence on a few forums you can use that to some extent in signature links for a kick start.

Ultimately if your going to have quite a few sites a stronghub/central website is going to be necessary. There is no point looking at any stats until after quite a few weeks and your showing up in all the main engines, you can then start to guage if your article is picking up some small amounts of traffic.

Liam has done $49 this month although I reverse stumbled it for a traffic boost but it's still doing $1-$2 per day just now and indexed.
Weapons has done $4 this month so far but isnt in google yet.
Home & Office Furniture $11 this month so far & $28 last month and is an older one I have.
Tattoo Fonts $62 so far this month
The rest have yet to be properly indexed so will need a few weeks before I get any meaningful data.

Once they get established they perform better with time and they all add up. Getting at least one good strong link to them is very helpful but I don't do any promotion other than that. It will be interesting if we compare how the new one's do in about a months time, we can then analyse and improve the recipe.

 

[BFTUK]

I made a little blog post here on how to create a simple mini-site, i hope some of you may find it useful.

 

[ScottJ]

Nice one Ash, the topics can be on anything that offers inspiration.

I had a problem with vibrating pipes in my house for some time and found a cure recently so reg'd a mini site in case others search for the same solution, if you ever do a search and the results are low (under 1 million) then ranking highly without any promotion is always a possibility.



Reg'd the domain on 6th April and No.1 in google.co.uk today because although there are quite a few results its very niche and specific without serious competition so looking for just a little bit of traffic to add value.

 

[BREWSTERS]

That's pretty impressive, just over a week to rank #1 in Goog!

Thinking out loud here - if you set up a free one pager or minisite through your registrar, ie like Godaddy (it's free if they run the adsense ads), get it listed with the SEs and wait to see some steady traffic. If then you switched to your own hosted site and adsense, would the name retain it's SE ranking?

That way it wouldn't cost you anything until you could be (more) certain of getting a return.

Would this work?

 

[ScottJ]

Yeah, now all I need is to sabotage the UK water system so that everyone gets vibrating pipes! :twisted: Not exactly a competitive term though but thats the idea.

Regarding test hosting, if you mean using godaddy's/free webspace to host a page/mini site and then move to a new domain after a while then you would likely lose your ranking, I am not sure though as I haven't tested it.

I have created mini site pages on an old trustworthy domain to help them rank and that can work to an extent but doing mini sites on domains is to add value to the domain, get it some history and make it earn its keep being me reasoning.

 

[BREWSTERS]

No, what I meant was to set up minisites with free hosting (usually subsidised by the host putting up adsense) and once they start to get some traffic, switch to paid hosting and your own adsense - same domain.

The must keep their SE ranking after the switch, because it's the same domain.

 

[BFTUK]

Hmm, i've not tested it but Google does apparently monitor nameserver changes, so its possible it may get picked up and penalised.

Besides if your going to the effort of writing the content (and its likely you'd need that to get a reasonable rank) you may as well just chuck up a site on a reseller account or as an addon domain on your hosting, and set it up to earn from the off.

 

[retired_member6]

Hmm, i've not tested it but Google does apparently monitor nameserver changes, so its possible it may get picked up and penalised.

Besides if your going to the effort of writing the content (and its likely you'd need that to get a reasonable rank) you may as well just chuck up a site on a reseller account or as an addon domain on your hosting, and set it up to earn from the off.

I don't get why domains get penalised for nameserver changes, can you explain that please? Considering google itself have several sets of nameservers themselves for operational puposes it seems a bit stupid. I'd love to move my domains about and change nameservers but I have the same concerns.

 

[BFTUK]

Here is a post from Matt Cutts, about moving a site to new hosting:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/

It looks like you should'nt incur any penalties if you follow his instructions, i think the main danger in losing or changing your rankings by moving host would be if you inadvertantly moved to a different hosting location.

Say you had a .com UK subject matter site and moved from UK hosting to US hosting, its likely your rankings will dip.

Likewise rankings could be affected by a poor host, he server could inadvertantly be blacklisted by Google or have slower response times etc.

I think the real danger in changing nameservers / hosts is the risk of duplicate content, as google picks up your site albeit temporarily at both sites.

 

[BREWSTERS]

I think the real danger in changing nameservers / hosts is the risk of duplicate content, as google picks up your site albeit temporarily at both sites.

Fair point!

 

[BFTUK]

Week one report for www.mildew.org.uk

Its indexed and pulling some small traffic from search engines, which has produced 5 click for $2.20. So i've got my £1 a week.

With such small traffic though, these clicks could be a one-off, 4 of the clicks for example came from (i suspect) one user using the link unit area.

TIP:

Use link units! (You are allowed one per page alongside upto 3 'normal' adsense adverts.

 

[ScottJ]

Jeez for some reason I had totally forgot about link units, thanks for the reminder Ash!

 

[BFTUK]

No problem Scott.

I see you actioned it pretty quick!

www.weapons.co.uk

 

[Pimalanious]

In my opinion it´s better to spent your time regging or buying type-in domains then to spend your time building mini-sites.
If you reg only 1 good type-in domain every few days you will bemaking more than with a minisite.

just my 2 cents$

 

[ScottJ]

Possibly, I am certainly more into developing than domaining so mini sites is not always for everyone but I have mini sites made within the last month doing $1 a day and mini sites from last year doing xxx per month.

I have reg'd traffic domains as well but would they not be better monetised with a mini site rather than a parking page, that is the point, if you have traffic then move straight to better income and also possibly increase traffic? if you dont, a mini site could help you get some traffic.

I bought a traffic domain domain last year for $4500 from SEDO and put a quick site on it which increased the traffic a good bit and soon paid itself back completely and I have now sold the domain this year for $15000, the buyer was only after the domain not the site on it, but couldn't ignore the traffic that I had generated and had to pay accordingly to take it off me. In fact as they only wanted the domain they have left my site on the domain after the sale WITH my adsense so that they dont lose the traffic while they develop their new site so it still ears every day just now for me

I would say traffic domain + mini site is even better.