Get Started with Domain Development
Feb 11th, 2009 by Richard
There is buzz everywhere about domain development being Domaining 3.0, the next big thing, the big push in 2009 etc.
Many great blog posts have been written on the topic lately as well.
I have been doing a lot of development for internal projects and well as with some of the domain owners out there, and I would like to share some experiences and ideas.
Move Away From Parking
We all know that parking is not development. There are some new flavours of parking available in 2009, and I tip my hat to the guys building these systems, but parking is only a short term revenue stream. If you want to squeeze the most revenue out of your domains, development is the way to go.
Development Falls into Two Camps
Depending on the domain name, there are two types of development strategies that work - mini sites and full blown development.
If you’ve got a one word category killer domain, then full blown development is the way to go. If you don’t, then mini sites are for you!
Mini Sites
Mini sites are a good solution for keyword rich domains with less than 1,000 uniques per day. Generally, you can get these sites built for less than $200 complete with 10 pages of unique content and even a few back links.
The sites are built on a CMS such as Wordpress which means you can keep adding new content yourself. If you do your research and build keyword rich content for long tail keywords related to your domain, you’ll find that you’ll make more revenue and gain more natural back links over time.
It is a good idea to have a $500 budget per mini site. After you pay the $200 fee for the site, you should get some listings in a few paid directories related to your mini site.
You should expect to receive three times the traffic to your site - once developed - than when it was parked. And that also means three times the revenue too!
You should consider a 12 month window to get your $500 investment back. By the time you build the mini site, add more content, get it ranked, get into some directories and let natural back links grow, 12 months will have passed. Broken down into real numbers, that means that if your domain is making $1 a day right now with parking, then spend the $$$ on a mini site and you’ll make more in the long run.
Full Development
Most domain owners are not developers so full development will mean working with a development partner.
Generally, good development partners are going to want a sizable up front fee and a sizable budget for development (think six figures here) OR they are going to want a revenue split of the site.
[I'll write more about the pluses and minuses of paid development vs. revenue split in another article]
You should consider working with a development partner for your domains that are category killers and have at least 1,000 uniques per day. A quality development partner will do all the project management, coding, SEO, link building and monetization work required for full blown development of your domains, so if you want to do a revenue split with them, they will want to work on quality domains to make it worthwhile.
A fully developed site requires regular monthly maintenance, such as adding fresh content, building links, researching new long tail terms to target, researching new monetization methods, to name a few.
Full development can be complex, but if you’ve got the right category killer domains, the returns can be many multiples higher than parking.
One of the greatest advantages of fully developed sites is that they can provide regular monthly income for years to come for you and perhaps your family too.
Why Develop Your Domains
From my own experiences, here are a few domain development tips:
- Developed domains are less likely to lose UDRP or WIPO. I think we have all read of UDRP cases where a domain was parked and lost because of it.
- Elliots has said it best, don’t develop dumb domains. Go do some keyword and advertiser research for some of those domains that seemed like a great idea at the time and you’ll see that you’ll never make your money back on the cost of a mini site.
- Since your site will have page rank, hundreds of pages indexed in the SE’s, natural backlinks, and higher click through rates on your ads, you’ll make more revenue.
What if you have 1,000 high quality keyword rich domains, how will you even manage all those mini sites? There are solutions for that too. If your mini site developer doesn’t have one for you, contact me.
Have you already started development? How about mini sites?
Please share your experiences in the comments.
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Rich, I’ve been building “starter” sites for close to 5 years… pumping out 100s of them per week.
$7 reg fee for a good keyword domain in com/netorg
few paragraphs of relevant and unique written content per page
10 or 20 images per page
proper on-page seo
few weeks go by
$xx - $xxx revenue per month from there on from all the search engine traffic thanks to Google and Yahoo
…it’s a done deal
most domainers and all other ppl fail to sell the domain to the search engines… they just don’t know SEO basics and don’t understand how to manipulate em properly
no, i dont do anything black hat or white hat.. i dont consider myself in the middle either… no grey hat.. no blue hat… none of that — i do what i know works 100% and it’s been working across many sites in the same and similar setup
don’t leave any traces and u should be all set — that is the best tip i ever got
most newbies DO leave traces
Best,
Mike
Mike,
Yes, to rank for long tail search terms, good SEO and 5 or 10 back links is all you need. If you can find some long tail terms with high payouts from google or affiliates, you can make a very nice income!
- Richard
And is article marketing a sufficient way to generate the backlinks? i.e. five articles submitted to ezinearticles.com?
@Phil,
No, not in my experience. I’d go after some deep links from wiki pages, paid directories in categories themed to your site and .edu links.
If you want me to look at a specific site or keyword phrases to give you some linking ideas, just fill out the Contact page and let me know the details.
@Richard, Thanks no specifics at this time I am just checking up on the advice given by a niche marketing course that indicated you could monetize a long tail mini-site with nothing but article marketing, which didn’t sound quite right to me when they are talking about pulling in 500 uniques a day.