Last Weeks Domain Name Sales

Another incredible week of domain sales, but it wasn't the Refresh.com sale for $115,000 or the PopUpBlocker.com sale for $75,000 that got my attention.

It was the sale of BigNaturalBreasts.com for $26,000.

Why? Because I own HugeMatureBoobs.com, a very similiar Domain Name. I mean look at it, it has all of your potential sites keywords right in the Domain Name itself.

Look at some of the searches on Yahoo in January of '07:

89,468 searches for Huge Boob
10,464 searches for Mature Boob
4,466 searches for Mature Big Boob

And 930 times for all Keywords combined.

What really gets me is that none of the websites currently competing for these keywords has them in their url. OK there is one subdomain named similar on a free site but how hard would it be to knock him out of the water SEO style?

Not Very.

But I don't build Adult Websites. And so the Domain Name sits, Parked at Sedo collecting Type-In traffic and making me money on Click Thru's. Suprisingly there is a lot of that for this domain; see my previous post.

It kills me that a Domain Name is excluded from Search Engine Traffic simply because it is parked. Otherwise it would be making 10 times the money it is now, or more.

Maybe I'll put it up for sale.

4 Letter Domain Resource

Because I have been posting lately about the 4 letter .com domain names and how they are disappearing at a rate of roughly 3000 a month, I offered my currently available list for everyone to use to register some for themselves. They are easy to sell on Ebay for double, and in some cases more, than the registration fee at 1and1.

Some are going for a LOT more, last week Bing.com went for $25,375, and a random letter one, IMAS.com got $17,000, and WAPO.com got $6,500.

And this one at Ebay is currently at $255 and still has 15 hours to go.

But now you don't need me to email it to you. Here is a far better tool, DYYO.com not only do they have the currently available list for free but they also have a list of domain names that have just been dropped. I checked the first 12 on the Feb. 21st dropped list and they were all still available.

Buy and Hold? Buy and Sell? Thats up to you. The important thing is to be buying these while you still can.

Domain Name Appraisal Game

Here's a fun little diversion from NameBio; a domain name appraisal game.

The first time I tried it I only scored 37 points, mostly because I messed up on the first two domain names. But you get the hang of it after a few trys.

Also something interesting, WhyPark. For a one time fee of $99 they will host and build up to 100 websites for your domains. The sample they give has a Page Rank of 4. Looks like it may be an interesting next step from parking, and a hell of a lot easier than development.

Haven't hear of anyone using but I started asking around. Also they only allow you to put in two Adsense blocks, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Free Domain Appraisal

I couldn't believe it either. Though this site does it all automatically and judges your domain name on technical aspects alone it is well worth plugging in some of your portfolio, even if its just to add another piece of information to your auction listing.

So whats the site? LeapFish (I did also try SwiftAppraisal.com which took way too long and gave me a greatly inflated estimate of my domains value)

Believe me, you'll want to bookmark that one.

Just out of curiosity I ran Vodka.com, the recent $3 Million Dollar seller, and they returned a value of $98,423. Not too shabby in my book.

It returned a couple of $98 dollar values for some of my four letter .com's. I think that may be a little high but you can't go wrong with the four letter domain names. Pretty soon they'll be all gone like the 3 letter ones are.

So if you didn't get my list of the ones still available email me for a copy. I have been using Domain Name Analyzer to filter out the recent sales. But thats kind of a pain as it'll only do 3000 domain names at a time and if you use an already filtered list it counts the number of the domain as a domain name itself. so you are only really searching 1500 domain names the second time through. Maybe theres an option when you export the text report, I don't know, haven't been playing with it long enough.

If I had more money I wouldn't be giving this list away, I'd be buying up the remaining domains. (I did sell the list on Ebay though a little while back) Over at 1and1.com, which is the cheapest I have seen for .com's, you can pick them up for $5.99 and most of the auctions on Ebay are selling around $11 to $15 a pop.

And with the names parked at NameDrive while the auction goes off you stand a decent chance of increasing your revenue.

So hurry up and get in on this, most of the names being registered lately are from the same few companies, at least one of which is out of China.

My only problem is that I seem to be the only one following th ICAAN 60 day rule restricting sales and transfers after purchasing a new domain name. Then again I plan on holding on to some of the four letter domains for at least a year or two to allow them to appreciate in value.

Domain Parking

Having ReParked many of my undeveloped domains earlier this month I was suprised to see the amount of type in traffic a few of them recieved.

Over at Sedo a few of my domains are getting two to three people or more a day from type in traffic alone. While their Payouts aren't bad I wondered about some of the other Parking services.

SmartName was one that I had read about that allowed you to upload a banner and customize your landing page to the point of including some links to some of your other webpages. After submiting my application I never heard back from them.

Maybe My Portfolio wasn't extensive enough or didn't have enough high traffic names.

Then someone recommended NameDrive, a fully customizeable parking service that has a bunch of banners to choose from as well as different parking options, such as the pay per click model or a portal option.

I still had a few domains sitting around doing nothing, 1Laundromat.com (Laundromat.com sold for $70,000 last Oct.) and 1TeenModel.com (TeenModels.com sold for $80,000 last month) and PaidShopper.info , the only .info I own and a couple of 4 letter .com's, RNVT.com, RNUW.com and RNUV.com. So I parked a few domain names with NameDrive to compare traffic and CTR.

Only I get so frustrated waiting for the name server changes to kick in and for the pages to show the changes.

If you are Parking at Sedo or just have some domains sitting around undeveloped try going over to the sandbox option at NameDrive to see how much more they can do for the look of your parked domain name. (Hint: use the Canvas option under the Template section to add a good header logo)

Even before the stats come out I think with the improved look NameDrive will out perform Sedo.

Overture Bid Tool no longer exists

I noticed it about a week ago. The Overture Bid Tool is no longer accesable. In its place is the following:

Gone
The requested resource/d/USm/search/tools/bidtoolis no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.

For me, as well as many more people, the bid tool was an important part in Domaining. Of finding what certain keywords were paying out before investing in that domain name or future website.

And as far as I can tell there is no replacement.

I halfway remember something about a tool in a Google Adwords Account giving suggested bidding prices but can't seem to find it.

If anyone knows where it is please let me know. And If I find it I'll post it here.

Blogging for Cash Part 2

Recently an article titled Joe Harris, Blogging for Cash caught my attention. Though it was written well over a year ago, Nov. 2005, the interview ended on a high note with Mr. Harris making an increasing amount of money by blogging about selected high paying keywords.

While not all of his blogs were focused on the high paying keywords, they were the ones making him money through Adsense. Here is a quote from that interview:

Initially I made just a couple dollars a month. It was not until July 2005 that I even realized that A) certain keywords pay more than others B) that certain ads pay more than others.

I really cannot give you an accurate picture of what I make from blogs because I am relatively new at this. I started in March 2005. What I can tell you is that for the months of March, April, May, and June I made at most a few dollars month. In July after I started building high paying keyword based blogs I made around $30. In the month of August now I am well over $120. I have in my opinion seen a dramatic improvement in my AdSense revenue in as little as two months.

The problem was that of the 15 blogs cited in the interview (not including the gambling related sites), 7 were no longer up, and at least one, but likely more, were being run by someone else. I was interested to know what happened to Joe and decided to do a follow up interview.

Many of your blogs were pulled from Blogger, was this backlash at all a result of the first interview?

Not particularly. I don't know that I got much backlash. Perhaps people reported my sites to blogger which is why so many got deleted but I can't prove it. I didn't get any harassing comments on my blogs or emails.

What exactly did happen in your fights with Blogger?

Well, if I could catch it in time, blogger would just lock a site of mine. I would ask for the site to be reviewed. After about a week or so blogger would email back saying my site was ok and not spam. NONE of my sites were ever declared spam by blogger. The problem was that several of my sites were just deleted. I didn't even get a chance to go through the review process. And then when I would try to recreate it, I would find someone had taken my URL which conveniently for them would already have a PR and incoming links.

1031-tic.blogspot.com I assume was one of them. How did it make you feel that these people were pouncing on your already generated traffic?

I was very pissed off when I lost my 1031-tic site. That was a good site. I liked reading about 1031 TIC too. It was new to me. It was a good paying key word. The problem is that blogger has released so many anti-splog bots that some sites just get deleted before one gets a chance to have the site reviewed.

I think it is unfair that people can snatch up a blog URL within minutes of its deletion. I think blogger should have a cooling off period of a week to allow the owner a chance to reclaim it. There are entities out there that site and snatch up blogs as soon as they are available. They look for PR3+ sites, take them, and fill them up with trash like porn. But there is nothing illegal with what they do.

The lesson for me was if I was going to be serious then I should buy my own domains and host my own sites.

At the end of the original interview you were making ever increasing amounts of money from Googles Adsense, yet in an earlier email you mentioned a dropoff in revenue

Yes, this past summer of '06 I saw a dramatic drop. I was never making a ton of cash. But I would get a check from adsense every couple of months for $100. I was hoping to build that up over time. I was doing the usual SEO, building links, etc. For a while my Lending Tree site would pull up on an MSN search on the first page. Sometimes as high as the number 2 spot. My Lending Tree site would also pull up on Yahoo on the first page (for a search fro Lending Tree respectively).

And then one day nearly all my blogs vanished from the major search engines (google, Yahoo, MSN). I kept resubmitting the URL's, They would pick the sites up for a few days then drop them. I began redoing my links, dumping irrelevant links, redoing my meta tags, and reading as much as I could about SEO.

Something happened. Google redid their PR and I lost the PR on alot of my sites, some of which were PR3. And then it just got to be too rediculous for me to follow. It seemed site owners and search engines are locked in a perpetual game of Spy vs. Spy each one trying to out do the other. I could not keep up nor could I compete. I just don't know enough.

On the one hand I understand the search engines want to make sure that when someone does a search, they will find what they are looking for. And so they have delisted a lot of sites they consider spam. But it seems too that seach engines have been played. Searches now pull up pages of paid search advertising often not even related to the search. Half of the top ten for a search these days seems to pull up these sites with nothing but paid link advertising for that particular search.

Ultimately I think the search engines want to get paid more for search than they already are. I think we are moving more and more toward a pay to play system.

Working full time and trying to maintain 28 blogs, what are your thoughts on the workload of maintaining that many blogs?

It ended up not being worth it. I would spend hours upon hours a day making a site, maintaining my sites, building links, doing SEO, reading, and teaching myself SEO. In the begining I was excited because I thought I could build the revenue. Even perhaps quit my job in a few years. But as the years dragged on and the revenue dropped it got harder and harder for me to be excited about just making blogs with adsense.

You also mentioned using other peoples articles in your blog posts, is this something you continue to do?

I just can't be an expert in all areas. While writing original content for one or two blogs is possible, trying to write original content for 20 or 30 blogs just seems unreasonable, especially since blogs should be updated at least once if not twice a day. But I did move toward only using free articles through sites like goarticles, ArticleYou and ezine versus risking violating someone's copyright.

What would you have done differently knowing what you know now?

Knowing what I know now, I would not have gone down the route of trying to create a bunch of high paying keyword blogs. I would instead by a domain or two and focus on selling products via an affiliate program. This is what I am leaning toward doing right now but just have not had the time to do it. I also would have taken classes on html and website building.

What words of wisdom would you impart from your experience to someone looking to make extra money in their spare time by blogging?

First off, if you are going to blog, blog about something you care about; something you enjoy. Don't expect to make any money; consider it a pleasant side effect.

If you want to make money off the internet beware all the online scams selling systems for making money. Beware the high paying keyword lists. Get yourself a solid background in designing webpages first. Study SEO first. Then buy a domain name and pay for hosting.
If you want to blog, I would advise against blogger. Pay for a service. Use typepad or moveable type.

If you want to just make thousands of blogs and hope for adsense revenue clicks then by all means use blogger. After all, it's free. I just don't know if it's worth it. People do it. Search blogger for cell phone, insurance, etc and you'll get thousands of hits for blogs setup solely for the purpose of advertising.

I guess someone is making money at it, just not me.

Parking Porn Domain Names

Recently I went back to parking my unused Domain names at Sedo.com

I had never had much luck with them in the past, AKA 3 years ago, but the interest in domain names has seemingly exploded. And since I had no current use for my Adult Domain Names, (my recent focus is on AdSense) I parked several 4 letter domains and almost all of my adult domains that I had bought the very first night I started domaining.

So far their traffic has far exceeding the past traffic of any single month for many of my other web sites.

Out doing some of my own websites!

And with no Content or search engine placement, Type In Traffic only.

So are the adult domains getting harder to come by? And my very focused names, are they worth anything to someone who wants to convert them?

I have no need for the Adult names I have accumulated over the years but maybe some people out there have a busines plan for this sort of thing?

Something to take advantage of the massive potential of keyword focused adult domain names and the adult affiliate programs.

4 Letter Domain Names

Recently a friend mentioned that he had a couple of 4 character domain names. I thought he had struck it rich as I was under the impression that all of the 4 letter and 4 character domain names had long ago been bought up. It turns out that I was wrong.

While the 4 letter domains are more valuable than the the 4 character domains there are still plenty of them left.

I recently bought biqx.com uuyz.com zohx.com bnqo.com imqh.com among others. And with 4 letter domain names going for astronomical prices, Zong.com sold for $13,000 at Sedo, Snab.com sold for $8,000, AATL.com for $4,250, VBWM.com for $6,005. And thats just last weeks sales.

Over at Sedo clan.com has 149 bids, and drek.com with a minimum bid of 10,000 $US already has 18 bids.

I wish I had enough money to buy up the remaining 4 letter domains but I don't. Then I realized that most people don't know how to find out which domains are still available. So I put my list up for sale:

Available 4 Letter Domain Name List Auction on Ebay

Someone will get rich owning these domain names.

Building a Niche Minisite

Here is a great article which condenses most of the important information on building a niche site all into one space. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Net Business Blog » Blog Archive » Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1): "One of the easiest ways to make money online today is by creating “niche minisites.” The internet is huge, and it’s growing bigger everyday. You can always make a site that attempts to compete in large content areas, and you can succeed if you put enough time, effort, and money into it. What if you don’t have a lot of time? What if you don’t have much startup money?"