Domain Magnate

Lets admit, most domainers don’t have a clue about SEO and while many know links are important for better google rankings, finding these links is no easy task. There are many guides, ebooks, online courses and all kinds of heavy stuff to help you educate yourself about search engine optimization, so I’m not going to do another one of those huge and mainly useless lists, but rather I’ll show my favorite method for getting good quality, on content links.

First a few guidelines for beginners: read more »

Now that I’ve found the designers and content writers, after a bit of testing the mini site building is proceeding at full force. Most sites are just 7-8 pages, but I’m also doing a few that will have a substantial amount of content, some 20-50 pages, articles, videos, news, flash and other elements.

Here are a couple finished mini-sites: Go Oslo, about the Norway capital with a few short articles and MyNamibia.com – about the Republic of Namibia in Africa.

Next step is to add links from some other sites, directories and social bookmarking services to get them all indexed and well places in google. It’s also good to avoid the nofollow links as they don’t contribute much value in google and are used by most social bookmarking and news sites, like digg, propeller, wikipedia etc.

The Bethel Park site I’ve posted about earlier is getting 75-85 uniques per day, but while the adsense clicks are rather high, the ctr is not so good. Probably the ads are too “blended in”, so I might change that one.

What do you think about the designs and content?

NyTimes has an interesting story on a guy who flipped a site for an awesome $173K, after buying it for $1800 and doing some changes. According to compete.com traffic estimates the site bird-cage.com only has 5-6k monthly visitors from US, so it’s strange that just 200 visits per day can provide such nice income. Besides the site only has 257 links in yahoo and doesn’t seem to have any decent google rankings for the top keywords.

So it really looks strange why would someone pay a healthy amount of money for a small site, without much traffic.

On the other hand it shows that development could bring nice profits and e-commerce sites are the money makers!

here is the article: read more »

Since I’ve started developing my US city domains I’ve been positively surprised by the adsense clicks.

In general my average adsense clicks are between $0.20-0.30 through out my sites, but the US city names had many clicks in the $0.5-$1 range. The traffic is as targeted as you can get and it’s easy to understand why advertisers would be willing to spend more, but these are relatively small cities, so the number of advertisers is quite limited.

These clicks are definitely nothing compared to what one could earn by attracting direct advertisers. I just read on dnjournal that PalmSprings.com earns over a million dollars a year only from the homepage! This definitely shows the potential in geo domains and pretty clear plan: get a top city domain, make some site and make it rank well in google, find advertisers to purchase banners for some annual fee. read more »

Dnjournal has an interesting story today about the recent GeoDomain conference.

Highly recommended to all geo domain owners. Among the contest nomination for top developed city domains were such gems as:

Vegas.com
Richmond.com
Hawaii.com
Branson.com read more »

I’m finally getting more into developing my domains and at first I’m planning to build a few small adsense sites on the city names and generics.

Here is one I did this week BethelPark.com – Bethel Park is a city of 33.5k people in Pennsylvania.

This one is a small site with 10 content pages. I’m currently testing different templates to see what gives the best ctr, but I think this one should do good. The trick is to make ads blend in and fit the theme. read more »

DomainMagnate.com presents an interview with Daniel, or tetrapak on NamePros and DNForum. Daniel is 23 and a full time domainer/web developer

– How long have you been into domaining and how did you get into it?
The story how i got into the domain industry is a bit funny, at least i can laugh now.. 4 years ago i’ve been helping a guy developing his Dubai related business website, and he promised a lot of things, like to be partners and such. I already had a website under developement with the first domain registered by myself, since then it is my biggest website with over 100k uniques per month, but that is another story. So this guy obviously haven’t paid for my work, but he introduced me the so called domain parking.. He sent me over an XLS file with his earnings of the last month. I was simply amazed when i saw that such domains as *Company*Properties.com (TM name..) can earn $8,000 / month purely by registering it and changing the nameservers. So with his help i figured i would register similar domains, as his top 10 domains were all earning 1k$+ / month, i thought i have nothing to lose. First i registered Properties*Company*.com/.net/.org.. and quickly parked them. Now i was officially R I C H. Then came the surprise… Day 1, no earnings.. Day 3 no earnings.. Day 6 ONE unique visitor! Now, i contacted the guy about my “problem”, and i told him that i believe he has faked his stats.. He said his brother is the one dealing with the domains, so he has nothing to do with them, but he knows a way to get a 50k offer on a domain. Which was…: Sedo Featured Listing! Yes, you guess it right, i had another 40$ burned. No sale… Of course he was surprised, but he asked me a favor, to bid on his domain (regfee name..) on Tdnam for 8k, he said there would be people to overbid me anyway. Sure. This was the end and luckily i had no contact with him since then. The good thing is, i started to earn with Adsense, and everything i earned i have reinvested in domains that were suggested by the friendly guys at over Namepros. The first serious sale was of a regfee hyphenated name for 8k that i registered in my first year.

– How many domains do you own and what is your primary focus?
Xxx names, it changes every day. No dot mobis and no dot asias I mostly own .com’s, but i prefer any other tlds for developement. I had success with .info’s as well, they are my lovely cheap ones (except the renewals!). read more »

If you, like over 95% of other domainers, want to develop some of your domains with minimal effort and expenses into a site that can bring revenue, here is one of the best and easiest methods: Set up a bidding directory.

What is a bidding directory?

It’s a regular web directory based on the auction system. Webmasters can submit their links and the links with highest bid will appear on the frontpage of the directory. For example here is one of mine: Casino Bidding Directory, as you may see the highest bid is $100, and the lowest bid on the main page is $60. So a bid of at least $61 is required to be listed on the front page. Minimum bid to submit a site to the directory is set to $9, and you can see that most bids listed in categories are about that amount, for example in advertising

The main advantage of a bidding directory is that its completely automated. read more »

Our programmers just finished this, check out the new small site on Mind Reading

Nothing big yet, just a flash game, but I have bigger development plans for it so this is just a placeholder.

Eventually I’d like to build it into a Mind Reading related community, with discussion boards, lots of free material and selling ebooks and other stuff. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

Any suggestions and comments are welcome.

Nothing says online chess better than Chess.com!

This is a perfect example of a truly premium domain and how it should be used.
I remember seeing chess.com for years having a one page site with some affiliate links to chess software and sets. As a true chess fan I’ve inquired on the price a couple years ago and it seemed high to me back then. Now I don’t remember what number they quoted, but seeing how chess.com got developed it sure was a fair amount to pay. Chess.com now has an alexa ranking of 12K indicating a very high traffic and most likely the biggest chess site online. read more »