What ads the most value to domains?

Hey everyone,

I have recently become involved in the buying and selling of domain names. I pick my names carefully and sold off my first and only website (which i bought as a test to see if this was a viable way to make money)

Anyways I sold www.canadamerchandise.com for about 130 bucks. it was completly undeveloped and parked at sedo.com

After the sale I was left curious though. Did I get that much because of the name? or because it had about 390 unique visitors in 2 months? or a combination of the two? What was the more deciding factor?

I have recently purchased 3 more domains and I believe the names are good enough to sell for more then what i got for canadamerchandise. I would like to increase their value and so am curious if traffic is the best way to do that or if its just the name bringing in the cash.

I realize obviously setting up the site and creating content and backlinks would payouff the most, but I dont want to host the site and worry about everything to do with it so I will just be parking it.

What do you all think? Did i just get extremely lucky the first time and these domains are doomed to fail or do i have something here and just need a little help from more experienced people in how to refine them.

By the way the new sites are loanitall.com loanitall.net and rapidloan.org

Would love some feedback here, go easy on me im extremely new at this and just trying to find a way to add to my income. Any help and replies would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Z

 

These are some things I look for in a domain name:

1. Must be a .com
2. Generates type in traffic
3. Is an easy to remember (brand) 1 - 2 word domain
4. Contains keyword(s) - highly relative to my niche for SEO Purposes
5. Has plenty of backlinks

I've taken domains that were registered and sold them a month or two later for as much as $1700. That was back in the day. Now most of the good .com's are taken and one needs to be creative. I think loainitall.com is a good example of creativity, and will fetch you some money. .org's tend to fetch much less money, but what you found rapidloan.org is good for a .org. But being a .org makes it less likely to be developed into a brandable loan site.

I personally find it a lot easier to sell domains that have backlinks and pagerank. If you have some rankings in the serps, that adds to the value of type in traffic as well. Having some rankings in the serps also helps to dispell those that may think the domain name is banned by the SE's.

In your business model of flipping domains, you may want to consider developing mini sites and developing some backlinks for them. This gives the buyer some added value to the domain in that it is semi-developed. Also, the domain will have some age on it and be closer to getting out of the sandbox for good search terms.

You are on the right track though and have picked catchy domain names. Stick with .com's and you'll earn more.

If you have any domain names with type in traffic, let me know. I'm always in the market for good domains that generate traffic on their own.

Good luck

 

hey Snowbird,

Thanks for the great reply. Some fantastic information there that I will keep in mind for future purchases. I understand I should be developing the sites but I find the task even of setting up a minisite quite daunting. I am not web illiterate but cannot seem to bring in traffic to my free pages let alone pages I have hosted and paid for. Can you please fill me in on what a serp is? I imagine its ranking in search engines correct?

Anyways any more information you can provide would be fantastic. I would realy appreciate some help in how to set up these automated minisites people have that I could then drive traffic too.

Thanks again for the reply and glad i managed to find some decent domain names to market.

cheers,

Z

 

I personally only buy and sell domains that contain a keyword for a specific niche. As snowbird pointed out, this can generate type-in traffic for free.

As far as setting up a site to get traffic to, you could simply get a free html template (freelayouts.com), open it up in a free wysiwyg editor (nvu.com) and add a re-written plr article, and upload it using a free FTP program (smart ftp). This is nothing fancy but atleast you have something to drive traffic to.

Submit the article/site to onlywire.com and other social bookmarking sites to get some traffic to it. Be sure the host you choose provides traffic stats. Then take a screen capture of your traffic stats to provide your prospective buyers. If you really get going in this business you will want a host that provides unlimited domain hosting. I found one for less than $10/mo.

Good luck.

 

very valuable stuff. I did not realize I could do it that way Bizy thank you.

I will be looking for into this when I get home this evening.

So I realize snowbird has said they are good domain names i bought. I would love some more feedback on them though. Do you guys think it was a good choice in domains? I do know the .net and .org sell for less a lot but I think I may be able to drive mor traffic to them hwhich should up their value a little bit.

 

What does PLR mean though?

 

Z,

The minisites I made reference to are just some basic content pages. As bizymarketer noted, you can use a WYSIWYG editor to make the pages from a template. The idea is to have a small site that passes a human review for inclusion into a web/article directory. This allows you to build backlinks, which is something you probably could outsource. Check the services section here - people are submitting to directories for as little as $8 for 300 web directory submissions.

To make a small site, you can use even the free tools offered by most larger hosts. I prefer Bluehost and it has all the tools you need to make a basic page, host unlimited domains, and use awstats on each of those domains. I believe the cost is $7 a month if paid 1 year in advance.

serp stands for search engine results pages. A small site with say 200-300 backlinks and rankings in the search engines for a few long tailed keywords is worth much more then a virgin domain to me. As a buyer, I already have backlinks using anchor text relative to the domain (ie. home loans, car loans, loans, etc.). And as a buyer if I can see the domain name listed in a Google search result page, which tells me the domain is not banned. The domain has some age to it, so its closer to getting out of the sandbox.

If you treat your domain business like wine, you will find domains are worth more if you let them age a bit and add some extra ingredients (backlinks). If your domains happen to get pagerank, that will add more value to them as well. But I doubt you want to hold onto an inventory of domains for 3-4 months. However, I know some people that do and its worth the wait.

Here's what I would do if I were you...

Continue to flip domains as you do. During this time, try to work with and learn to use a WYSIWYG HTML editor. It would also be helpful if you could learn how to use an image program so that you could add/replace some basic images on your site. Find a template and just remove the text/images and add some of your own. Out of ideas of what to write on the page? No problem. Go to wikipedia (dot) org and do a little research to give the creative process a jolt.

Let's say you bought some domain names and nobody is interested in buying them. Now you can create a basic site (3-5 pages), submit to some directories, and let it age. Throw adsense on them to earn a few bucks while they are maturing. That same domain nobody was interested in can easily be sold once Google exports toolbar pagerank. Remember this: People will buy any domain name if it has pagerank! And I mean that! Take dskfjdkjf.com. If it were a PR 3, you could sell it and make a profit!

You really can't lose money with domains if you take it the extra step. The worst case scenerio is that you have to sit on a few domains for a few months before making 20+ times your investment! And once you do these minisites a few times, you'll be able to create them in under an hour or so.

 

wow. Snowbird. This is great stuff. I will take your advice to heart and do as you say and continue selling these pages while learning how to use a html editor. Once upon a time i knew basic html but I cant recall much since i never used it. I can do images as I am a graphic designer. I can make your stuff look pretty but i cant for the life of me make it a functioning website just yet lol.

cheers, i really appreciate the long detailed replies

 

Z,

I don't know which imaging program(s) you can use, but if you do some research on slices, hotspots, layers, etc., you will find that you can almost make an entire Website in an imaging program (I prefer Fireworks).

A few years back I designed a Website for a photography company. I made a nice Website with Fireworks and left a small 3 paragraph area for their HTML text. They were more concerned about looks and curb appeal to compliment their print advertising. It was a nice looking site with images of previous clients. And since the owners of the company could not give me text to put on the site, I was able to limit their efforts to giving me a few small paragraphs per page. lol

When thinking of a template, just keep in mind productivity. You don't want to spend 8 hours creating a Website for each domain. Basically what you want is to maybe change an image or two, cut and paste some text, and change the page titles, meta tags, and possibly internal link URL's. The first template will take some time to make it easy to replicate, but after that it should consume very little time/effort.

Remember, you can include a links page (with no links on it) and a contact us page with just a throw away hotmail E-mail address. Add your main page and your done.

 

you could use SteadyNiche to generate a website in 5 minutes. It needs keywords and it auto-generates a website with content related to the keyword. It also has adsense built-in for gathering revenue. It should gather pagerank in the normal fashion too.

There's a thread on it if you use the search button. Well worth it if domaining is your thing.

 

Wow Snowbird,

The information you shared in this thread is amazing. I am so glad I found this forum!

Tam

 

agreed i cant thank you enough snowbird.

Blade thats a very cool idea. I will certainly look more into that. this means i just gotta figure out hosting for these sites.

cheers,

Z

 

I read through this post, and there is good info. I have about 100 domains sitting collecting dust. I am looking at using steadyniche on them.

Can anyone give a concise review of this tool/autoblog.

 

here you go : http://www.screamingstones.co.uk/2007/10/21/your-empty-domains-into-live-sites-fast-review-of-steadyniche/

very good is SteadyNiche.

 

Well, I am convinced. I have 3 websites parked right now making nothing. I will give steadyniche a try. Can anyone suggest a good place to host the sites for cheap that has ioncube on the server as suggested by the linked article (thank you again blade007) I am very new to hosting (as in never lol) and so this could prove difficult for my first time around so if anyone is willing to offer some advice on how to go about installing this steadyniche program and whatnot please pm me or reply here.

Also please let me know about good cheap hosting that has that ioncube application installed like i said above.

cheers, and thanks for all the amazing help

Z

 

For hosting I use bluehost as they have unlimited domains, and are very reasonable. I also spoke to one of their tech support and steadyniche will run on it.

 

interesting. I will look into their hosting. Thanks for checking that they can run steadyniche thats a huge plus

 

PLR means private label rights. It's a license that allows the user to edit the work. These can be products such as ebooks, articles, software etc.