I don't want to spend a ton of money and I'm not overly concerned about branding. I want to buy up some names to put Adsense ads on them and use the rest as affiliate sites linked to by Adwords. Other than .com, should I be purchasing any .net domains or my-original-domains with dashes? And which is worth more in the long run?
I prefer dashes in names. Some words when they are clumped together actually make other words which confuses the search engines. Also, 1book has about 70,000 results. But, 1-book has over 700,000. It's the same set of words...but, I don't think the search engine can seperate the words that accurately which is why the hyphenated words bring more results.
Well, initially I would agree with you but then I had heard that the SE's actually can separate the words in the domain name. Maybe someone else can shed some light on the subject...
I'm no expert, but I think most people would say that it's always best to go for names without dashes and pickup .net I'd be interested to hear what others more experienced in these matters think too.
Pick the name that people will remember and come back, that is of course if you have a site worth coming back for. If you just have a affiliate/adsense site with just the aim of passing traffic through to get commissions or sales then go for the keyword rich domain. My take on domain names.
.net if you want people to type in the address to get to your site most of the time, dashed .com if majority of the traffic is going to be from search engines, imho.
In terms of the value of the domain, a dash will severely lower your profits if you ever plan on selling the name. Domainers like myself, try and stay away from domains with either number of dashes because they don't sell well. But from an SE perspective I really can't comment. A good .net will sell better then a dash 99 out of 100 times.