More Thoughts on Making Money With Domains

Jon at Super Affiliate Marketing Blog has a post about making money by buying a bunch of domains and throwing up a Wordpress blog and some Adsense code on each of them. It's called Why Investing in Cheap Domain Names & Blogs is Better Than the Stock Market.

I don't agree with the idea of putting up a bunch of useless or mostly useless blogs just to make money from the Adsense clicks. And on the scale he's talking about (over 2000 domains), I'm guessing that's about all that's going to happen. He's estimating that he'll make around $75,000 in Adsense revenue over the course of a year, which works out at a bit less than $40 per blog. With domain registration and hosting fees, profit ought to be around $20-25 per blog per year.

What I'm wondering is, what multiple of that "per-blog" earning could be achieved by putting in a bit more effort and making them into blogs that are actually worth reading? Obviously that won't work with thousands of blogs, but what about a more manageable number, like 10 or 12? If Jon's single-post blogs are set to make $40 a year in Adsense revenue, can real blog make 5 or 10 times that amount just from Adsense? And can it make even more with other advertising included?

With GoDaddy currently selling .info domains for $0.99 apiece, I have to admit I'm tempted to find out. $10 for the domains, and another $10 or $20 for some cheap hosting for a year, and I'm ready to go.

It looks like Sapphire at Affiliate Marketing Journal is planning something similar. After realising that she has a bunch of zero-maintenance sites that bring in $21-68 per month, she's decided to create at least 10 more of them. If her Project2160 works out, she'll be making an extra $200-700 per month from those sites.

Tools for Dealing With Scammers, Spammers, and Squatters

While I was reading up on this whole typo-squatting thing, I came across links to a couple of tools that could be very handy for webmasters. I've downloaded and installed Microsoft's Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol. I've played around with it a little bit, and it's got two cool features.

The URL Tracer part creates a list of all the sites that are contacted when you visit a website. And it also lets you know if any of them have given you a cookie. For example, if you visit the FreeCashSpace blog, the list of sites that you're interacting with in some way include:

• Amazon.com
• Blogger.com
• BlogMad.net
• BlogWise.com
• Feedburner.com
• FreeCashSpace.com
• HaloScan.com
• ImageShack.us
• PayPerPost.com
• Technorati.com
• TinyUrl.com
• VxBox.com

In most cases, they're just serving images, but Feedburner is giving you a cookie (I didn't they were doing that) and Technorati is running a javascript (I did know that).

The Typo-Patrol lets you type in a domain name, and it will generate a list of possible typos (it came up with 198 typo domains for freecashspace.com). Then it will try to visit the website associated with each of those typo domains to see if any of them are active. It started a typo scan, but when I realised that it would probably take an hour or two to check all of them, I stopped it. But I can see where this tool could come in handy for companies who want to see if they're the victims of typo-squatting.

And the other program was called Fiddler. Fiddler serves as a proxy and shows you all the incoming and outgoing data between your computer and the net. It shows you HTTP headers, source code, and all sorts of other things. It's meant to be used by developers, and I wouldn't have a clue how to use it to its full potential, but I can see how it could be a very handy little tool for tracing comment spammers, click frauds "search engines", and people hiding things in 0-sized iframes. The Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project has some instructions to help people report comment spammers using Fiddler and WHOIS domain registration info. And if you don't think sending a few emails or making a few phone calls will do any good against the comment spammers, Chris O'Hara has a success story for you.

Mircosfot Going After Typo-squatters

After blogging about how to make money with domains earlier this week, I thought I'd better blog about Microsoft's announcement that it's going after cybersquatters. And they're encouraging other businesses to do the same.

According to their press release, Microsoft believes an average of 2,000 domains containing one of their trademarks are registered every day. And that somewhere between 75-90% of those are registered by professional domain holding operations.

It turns out that registering domains containing trademark terms is against US federal law (the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act), if there's a bad faith intention to profit from them. It doesn't outlaw legitimate uses of others' trademarks, including comparative advertising, comment, criticism, parody, news reporting, fair use, etc. (or so says the Wikipedia). But it does cover parked domains with a bunch of ads, selling domains at extortionate prices, etc. A few things you might want to keep in mind if you're thinking about getting into the domaining scene.

I've been tossing the idea around for the last few days, and I still haven't made up my mind. I'm definitely not interested in any sort of trademark infringement, and I don't really want to buy up a bunch of domains just to make money by parking them. Filling up the web with more useless garbage isn't really what I'm into, and it was interesting to read some of the comments in the SlashDot post about Microsoft's announcement.

I wonder how many people see domainers as being just as bad as spammers? If you've got some thoughts or opinions, please leave a comment.

Get Paid to Park Domains

Matt Coddington has an excellent introduction to "domaining" (making money buying and selling domain names) called Domaining 101.

Matt goes through the process step-by-step, from deciding which domain extensions are better (.net is good, but .com is king) and how to use SEO tools to help you select the best domain names, to links to the tools and sites that you can use to make money from those domains.

One thing to keep in mind is that Domaining 101 mostly focuses on making money by parking the domains, and is a little short on detail for those interested in selling the domains directly. I found the whole thing very interesting, even though I've never really given much though to getting into the domain hoarding business.

Thanks to Maki at DoshDosh for pointing me to Matt's posts, along with several other good ones about getting started in the domain game. If you're interested in getting into domaining, read Maki's post for links to good places to start learning.