Originally I was going to call this The Domain Name Puzzle because I have found the missing piece to my story, but the 99 kept coming back into my thoughts… hope you enjoy…

Domain Names, Websites, and Minisite development

This is the beginning of a personal challenge/journey to demonstrate how to make money online with Domain Names, mini-sites, full-blown websites, domain flipping and website flipping. Read along if you would like to learn more!

If you’ve been following Domain Nitro for very long then you know my real passion is finding, buying and selling domains and then how domain names can be developed to make money online.

So why would I bother taking 99 domain names and turning them into 99 websites in 99 days? Glad you asked. What follows is a little history, a case study intro, and hopefully a new outlook on making money online.

A little Domain Name background

When I decided to buy my first domain name back in ‘99, I decided I wouldn’t spend more than $99. I had no idea how much it cost to register a name, get hosting or anything else. I spent a ton of time trying to register a domain and for every name I thought up and tried to buy, I met the dreaded “domain is already registered”.

I got really lucky when I just typed one of the domains into the browser and it redirected me to a domain purchase page. I can’t even remember who the reseller site belonged to or which company had it listed, but I immediately paid the money and took ownership of the domain…

…and promptly did absolutely nothing with it. Sound familiar?

Domain name mistakes abound

I held onto that first domain name for 9 years and due to some issues I had to part ways with it. Worst mistake of ’09.

Well, maybe that was the second worst mistake of ’09. Worst mistake was only brewing…

When I got rid of that first domain it got me even more curious about the domain name business. It was then that I found SEDO, GoDaddy auctions and Afternic.

I bought about a hundred domain names in two days and sold one of those within a week that covered the cost of all the others. In retrospect that was probably the worst sale I ever made because it made me believe I was a domain name genius and from that point on I was hooked.

I promptly proceeded to buy about 1200 domain names… WooHoo!!! Wait, how many do I have? WTF?

After buying 1200 domains you’d think I had a plan on what I was going to do with them… and I did… Sell them all for lots of money!

The problem was I had too many plans and not enough action. Classic noob domainer error I’ve come to find out, but that doesn’t make me feel any better and it sure didn’t get my cash back.

I’d spent $15,000 and thought I’d sell them within a year for at least $99,000 or more… surely that will work after taking a look at all the sales over on Ron’s site that documents weekly domain sales.  Right?

Reality sets in…

After my initial early success I only sold a few domains here and there over the next few months… but it was enough to keep me thinking I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t even actively trying to sell domains, just listing them on the bid/auction sites and domaining sites.

Then things started to slow down. I soon realized I had about $10,000 worth of renewal fees staring me in the face in just a couple months. Reality had set in and sheer panic soon followed. I HAD to start selling some of these quick!

I revised my pricing and listed a lot of domains cheaper and cheaper with mild success, but nowhere near enough. I finally decided to drop 80% of them.  Painful because I still liked most of them and had developed an attachment to them.  

Personal feelings and attachment can hurt you in business and I wasn’t treating it like a business – more like an expensive hobby where I was just collecting.  Kind of like the rusty piles of junk you see on old guys farms on American Pickers or something…

I had started to learn more about domain names on blogs from people like Domain Shane, Chef Patrick and Morgan Linton and I didn’t like what I saw.

If I had read their blogs and ebooks earlier I could have bought one or two domains for a few thousand bucks and would have been much better off… Most people make this same mistake, but it still doesn’t make me or my wallet feel any better.

Making money online is hard, but should it be?

After I did a fire sale and dropped domains left and right I became very frustrated. I didn’t actively try to sell anything, just told myself that people who claimed success were liars about how much they earned online and that making money online was just too hard.

It was then that I looked back at my parking stats, Google analytics, and Google adsense and was amazed at what I saw. One site that I had built in a few hours for a friend who was sick was getting consistent traffic and had brought in more traffic and money than all the domains I had parked combined.

Wait a minute here – why would this one site with less than a dozen pages be getting that much traffic? I looked a little closer and it was obvious… The site was very focused, all original content that was inadvertently SEO’d by some miracle and was laid out in a clean, easy to navigate format.

The AHA! Moment

That very moment I knew I was onto something…

I decided to build out a couple domains with small sites and focus on them for a few months. I’ve gotten good traction and more traffic on one of those sites than I had ever seen before.
Finally! Something that can make money online. Now I need to focus!

So how do I proceed when I know the following facts:

1. I love looking for domains, buying them or just seeing what is selling.
2. I love Internet Marketing, SEO and all things related.
3. I can get lost for hours browsing new domain listings, new internet marketing products, domaining blogs, internet marketing blogs, domain auctions, etc
4. I have very little free time considering I have:
   • A normal job
   • An hour commute each way to said normal job
   • Two daughters who participate in competitive sports, student council, math teams, journalism team, GRC, media masters and more
   • A wonderful wife… Hi honey!
   • Tons of emails every day
   • Oh, and I like to work out every day as well. I pick things up and put them down at 5am routinely.
5. In other words, I have a normal life for the most part. Crazy hectic and busy from 4:30am to 10:30pm.

The PLAN!

I was contemplating how I was going to get more sites built and weakly trying to work out a plan. Looking at the calendar I saw 11/11/11 was here!

Yo 11!!!!
You may have noticed the title and repeating 9’s in this article… Odd, coincidental and yes, purposeful.

I was trying to pick a large number of sites to develop in an aggressive time period and the 99 kept coming up. Pair that with 11 and you get one of the classic motivational numbers of all time – “give it 110%” (99+11 for the mathematically challenged he-he!). So I decided on 99 domains and 11 for the month or day (should have been 11/11/11, but I’m deliberative/procrastinating so what can I say)

Then I saw where Matt Cutts does the 30 day challenges and I was onto something. After a little more research on his site I found the NaNoWriMo which seems crazy hard to me, but the point is knocking it out in small consistent chunks. Plus I have a writer friend who is killing goals left and right with this process!

I knew I couldn’t build 3.3 sites per day to get it all done in 30 days, but I thought about how busy Matt is and what he could do in 30 days so I decided to go after one site per day… thus 99 days.

It’s on, baby! Let the games begin.

So starting on 1/2/12 I will be building a site every day… in 99 minutes or less. (edit, this used to be 11/30/11, but life happened and I got started late)

Everything included from setting up hosting, installing WordPress or an HTML5 template, creating a simple logo, writing content pages, adding analytics and reporting on how each site is doing on a weekly basis.

The challenge will end on 4/10/12 and it should be crazy fun! If you have an idea on what to call this challenge leave me a comment below – I’d really appreciate it!

Most of these will be mini-sites. One site each day usually Monday thru Saturday with additional content and backlinks on Sunday.

A choice few will be more robust sites. One each week that I will build up over time to have something more than just simple sites.

The 80/20 rule.

I fully expect that the 80/20 rule will be in full effect. 20 percent of the sites will provide 80 percent of the revenue.

I also expect 80 percent of my success will come from 20 percent of my efforts – I just don’t know what those are yet, but I will be testing that hypothesis. And vice versa I expect 80 percent of my problems will be in 20 percent of the work. Don’t know what that is yet either, but I expect it will be content, or ads, or both.

I will also write a short post about each of these domains, my plan and thought process, and site development that I will post here on my blog.

Sound interesting? Want to know how the sites perform and how much money they make? Inquiring minds want to know!

I will be posting summaries weekly, but they won’t include the domains or specific site amounts since I don’t want to publicize the domains in that way too much. I’m also going to keep a progress meter prominently featured at the top of the blog so you can see progress at a glance.

I can hear it now… “AHHHH!!!! Please give me the details, I won’t tell anyone, PLEAAASSEEE!”

Ok, I’m a pushover so if you want to know what the specific domains are such as how much traffic they get, and how much money they make, how long they take to make it in Google page results, etc simply sign up for my email list and I’ll give you the details. You can sign up here.

P.S.

As an added incentive, I’m going to have a give away or contest at the end of the 99 days where I give the winners(not sure how many at this point) their choice of a site I’ve built in this challenge (I’ll select about 50-80 of the 99 sites and the winners will get their choice from that pool). You have to be registered on the email list to win.

P.S.S.

As another incentive I might be giving away some bonus swag to chosen commenters, Google+ connections, Twitter followers, Linkedin connections, and FaceBook Friends. So get social with me now… Who knows, I might even have some additional surprises in store during the event!

This is a 7 part series on some of the often overlooked ways you can sell domain names. My focus on these is to have as little additional work involved as possible – enough has already been written in how to actively market and sell domains (if you need a reference to some of this let me know). In retrospect, this overview of the 7 surprising (and simple) domain name sales methods should have come first (each tip article came first), but I’m glad I didn’t because part way through I swapped out number 6 with a better method.

Selling domain names has to ultimately end with the sale of your domain name and the following is a list of ways that I’ve either sold a domain or in one case a friend of mine made a sale. None of these methods took more than a few minutes time and are in addition to the normal sales channels.

Method number 1 has a little background so without further ado, here are the 7 methods:

Domain name sales method #1: Whois your most targeted buyer?

Domain name sales method #2: Take advantage of the oldest profession in the world (communication profession that is)

Domain name sales method #3: Track and analyze your parking statistics for upward trends

Domain name sales method #4: Set up an email account on your parked domains

Domain name sales method #5: Check out the domaining forums – seriously

Domain name sales method #6: Use a premium listing on domain sales sites

Domain name sales method #7: Forward your parked domains traffic to your sales page.

I hope you are able to take advantage of at least one of these – please let me know of your experiences and anything that might have worked for you in the comments below!

This is the final installment in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 6, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #7:

No Parking on the dance floor!

No parking baby! Telling my age a bit if you catch that reference..

Most domain owners who have parked domains have seen significant reductions in the Parked pages revenue and in a lot of cases a decline in traffic. If you have product domains or names that get any decent type in traffic you may be frustrated with your pennies you get from parking.

As an internet business, what is the most valuable thing you can have – traffic of course. And in this case your domain has VERY targeted traffic since people are typing it in their browser! Why not use domain forwarding and have all that traffic go to your domain sales page! Even better, have a sales page segmented by types of domains or in your Forward address and group like domains together!

You can also include a parameter like “domain=YourDomainName” so you can still track how much traffic is coming from each domain. This combination is surprisingly effective and while they are on your site they will often browse around quite a bit and possibly buy something or click an ad at the very least! I have used this process to forward like domains to an existing developed domain with a similar topic and it worked well for that, too! Be creative and don’t settle for just letting your domains gather dust – one sale and you can make more than the parking for all your domains for the entire year!

Good luck if you try this tip or any of the 7 for selling domain names!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

This is Part 6 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 5, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #6:

Resale markets like Afternic, Sedo and GoDaddy – with a Premium twist

If you have more than one or two domains then you probably have them listed for sale on Sedo, Afternic, Godaddy, or one of several other resellers. No secret there, but what you may not know is that several of these services have “Premium Listings”, not to be confused with other “Premium” services which require you to pay up front a fee to have your domain listed in more prominent areas of the domain search results.

Premium Listings, such as the Premium Domain Listings on GoDaddy, have a much heftier commission on the back end so you need to account for that in your price (currently they are at 30%).

That may seem like a steep price to pay, but the way they feature these domains is at a fixed price so you can account for that in your listing price. They get some pretty good results because when someone searches for a domain such as walkingshoes.com and it is listed as a Premium Listing they go straight to a sales page with the price ready to go. If there isn’t an exact Premium Listing available then one of the more prominent suggestions is to buy similar “premium” domains right beside where they suggest other extensions!

You don’t pay 20 or 30 or even 50 dollars to have it featured in a general category of domains (I’ve done this on Sedo and Godaddy with poor results) and it gets better placement because they do a good job of pattern matching what the original name search was for with the available domains in the Premium Auctions.

I know several people who have had great success with this and considering how few offers I’ve gotten recently on GoDaddy I’m definitely going to add more Premium Listings!

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #7 is coming soon!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

I have been looking at ways to make money with blogs and domain names and websites recently and I came across an eBook (free, so don’t sign off) from John Chow that is really well done.

John is one of the more prolific bloggers as far as making money blogging so it shouldn’t surprise you that he has a pretty good ebook. What is surprising is that it is free and full of good information and all it will cost you is your email address if you pick it up from his site. I’ve already downloaded it and he says it is free to redistribute so if you don’t want to give him your email you can find it here.

I generally take lots of notes and mark up documents as I read them so I thought I would just type them up and create a short list of tips for making money on your blog/domain in a review format. The following are my notes and comments/thoughts I had as I read the ebook:

Chapter 1 – it is an introduction, but it is really all about what I would term accountability. Take a look at this quote related to “Someday Never Comes”:

“When you talk to a successful person about his goals, he’ll tell you what he plans to do and when it will be done. When an unsuccessful person talks about his goals(assuming he even has one), you’ll hear something along the lines of “I hope to do this someday.” Here’s a clue for all you losers out there; someday never comes.”

Some people will call that quote mean or too blunt or say that it is overstating or oversimplifying. BS! Think back about a time when you were most productive or accomplished more than you thought possible. Usually people think of these times and they are related to a project with a specific due date or something they really enjoyed and knew had to get done. A work project with a deadline is really just a goal someone else imposed on you… also, the things you enjoy usually tend to get done and done well! Why not blend the two? John says you have to have a time limit or it isn’t really a goal. I think that is the very heart of a goal! So do something you enjoy and set timely goals!

Chapter 2 – Recommended Money Makers. No, I’m not talking about Chris Moneymaker or anything related to poker this time. In this chapter, John goes into different ways to make money on your blog.

First is content links – now this ASSUMES you have some really good content… Content links are great because you don’t have to sacrifice any ad slots in your primary advertising areas (usually following the F pattern). These types of ads read your content and dynamically place hyperlinks as ads as part of the text so it is easy to implement and pretty unobtrusive. He recommends Kontera and even lets you piggyback off his subscription because they usually won’t approve smaller blogs. I’m sure he gets some kickback or ad revenue, but who cares if it gets you in the door.

Next is Text Link Ads – I haven’t used a service like this before, but basically it looks like you are giving up your recommended/favorite sites section of your blog which makes it look like you are recommending whoever they place in they ad… I’m not too sure about this one since it is YOUR reputation you are selling… If anyone has any experience with this please let me know.

Google Adsense comes next and for the vast majority of people that is going to be the first network you experience. I like Adsense and they tend to display truly relevant links and they have text, image and video ads of all sizes so you can really fine tune your site and test different size ads with different layouts. Seems like a waste of time, but small changes make huge differences with adsense and almost any other network in terms of conversion (clicks in this case). He also mentions Bidvertiser, but unless you really need to get paid at $10 increments I can’t see the benefit.

This got much longer than I expected so I’ll post the rest later. Let me know what you think and whether you like to see links/reviews like this one.

~~ DomainNitro ~~

This is Part 5 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 4, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #5:

Domaining forums

Yes, I know the forums are primarily other domainers and the vast majority of the stuff you will find there is junk, but you can find some deals if you check every few days… This is about selling domains though, and one place most people forget about is the “Domain Names Wanted” section of the Forums.

I have posted countless PM’s to Namepros and DNForum requests and although I’ve gotten a few leads, most are no thanks… Until recently.

I replied to a wanted post for a name about a month ago and the person said it was overpriced and wasn’t just right and would take it off my hands for much less so I said No Deal and just forgot about it.

Weeks went by and I got an email about the same domain with a low offer and rejected it, but was happy it was getting some interest. A couple more days and I get a PM with a much better offer which I accepted after a bit of negotiation (and asking if the email was the same person, which it was.)

All in all, I don’t know if the time I’ve spent lurking the wanted section makes up for the sale, but they do lead to sales for some people and in this case it was one of mine! The moral to this story is just because you get rejected a LOT, don’t give up and eventually you will succeed.

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #6 is coming soon!

~~ DomainNitro ~~