All start at 1.00 with No Reserve

See Complete Listings at Ebay, click HERE

LosAngelesCheapHouses.com           199.00
NewYorkCityCheapHouses.com      199.00
ChicagoCheapHouses.com                 199.00

Take all three for 500.00.

So, I checked out the two letter plus a number combination (three characters total) and everything other than the two I bought (in dotcom and dotnet), see the for sale page, was available.   Now, that’s out of  a combination of over 22,230 posibilities (yes, I checked them all). Wow, again.  I am a bit surprised. 

I was wondering what the attraction was to such not too common phrases would be.  But then I did some google searches for these.

The thing is, these three letter combinations can be used for a number of things, as abreviations for that group of keywords.  And, being as short as possible, they can be easy to remember.  They can be multi-use for the end user.  Making them very easy to market.  Also, they tend to sell pretty well on Sedo.com, my current domain aution of choice.  I’ve tried a few domain sale outlets, and so far, Sedo.com has been the top paying domain selling outlet.

You may be asking, what others have I tried.  Well, so far I have tried to sell on Ebay, godaddy, sedo and twitter.  Twitter?  Well, yes, you see twitter is, or so I’ve heard, is a good marketing/networking tool to get in touch with other domainers and reach them instantly.  You see, I say “so I’ve heard” because I have had very little success posting on twitter.  The thing with twitter is that your post can be lost in matter of seconds.  There is so much traffic on there that your post has little chance of being read.   Granted, having thousands of “followers” and reaching them instantaneously is very attractive, but the problem is that if all thousand followers post something within the same time frame your post will have very little chance of being read by anyone.  I think it began as a good idea but the end result was no where near the desired result.  Too much information can be a bad thing.

So, unless some of these three letter/number domains get dropped anytime soon, don’t go looking for any.  They are all taken!

I often read about how domains are equated to real estate.  Sitting on a prime piece of real estate that’s located in an excellent location is like having a domain that has potential undeveloped value.  I don’t agree 100% with this analogy.  For starters, real estate requires that the neighboring area is also well developed and has traffic.  This does’nt apply to domains, at least not in the same way.  Domains don’t necessarily depend on neighboring domains to have traffic.   Also, the domain doesn’t necessarily have to have any traffic yet to be of value.   So how does it equate to real estate and how can we value a domain’s worth?

Well, first let’s divide domains into two categories, developed and undeveloped.

Undeveloped can be parked or unpublished.  They are generally just sitting there with no or little substantial content.  They rely solely on their domain name, and the demand on this name,  for worth.  We need to find out if there is demand.  We can do a google search for the exact word or phrase and see the number of hits we get to see how popular the word or phrasing is.  We can also use online services to see how many times a month that word/phrase is searched for.   Estibot.com’s online appraisal site gives us this data.   Once we find it’s demand, we then need to determine if this is a niche term or a general term.   In looking for a domain’s value, we’d like to determine who the end user is.  Having a domain appeal to a niche market may limit it’s value because some market’s may not be interested in paying top dollar for a domain.

Having a general term will have higher potential for getting top dollar.  Looking at the search results, you can determine who will be the end user and possibly what they may be willing to pay.

Another factor we would like to consider is the competition for that particular word or phrase.   We can overlook this when doing our keyword selection to our  search engine optimization but looking at it now will give us an idea if what we have is already heavily populated.   A high keyword competition means that lots of other domains are competing to get traffic from those keywords.  Having lots of demand for a set of word or phrase with little competition is best.

Besides having demand for the word or phrase, and low competition we need to see if the word or phrase is marketable in a money making way.   Let’s take one of my domains as an example, Peraturan.com.  It has 1.9 million hits on google with 2200 searches a month.   The keyword competition rating on it is 5/10, not too bad.   The word means regulation in Indonesia.  I have yet to find a market for it.  I cannot get affiliate ads for it since there aren’t many affiliate ads related to it.  Estibot values it 2200 dollars, it’s algorithm takes into account it’s traffic, google searches and competition rating (among other factors) but, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a way of judging it’s marketability.  So we need to take into account how marketable the word or phrase is to determine it’s value.

To summarize the worth of a undeveloped domain, a generic term is more valuable than a niche term.    Better to have high google searches a month for the term and high google frequency (demand) and low keyword competition.  You should also be able to find a way to market the word/phrase.

Let’s look at developed domains.  A developed domain has a website.  Either it’s a mini-site, blog or full fledged ecommerce site.   I have found that the one determing value to a developed site is  it’s traffic.  If the site has traffic, the site has been well developed and has developed a market.  The bigger the market, the higher the traffic and the more valuable to the domain is.   When determining a value for selling a business, the general rule of thumb is to get your puchase price back in 3 to 5 years.  I don’t think this translates directly to purchasing developed domains but it could serve as a general guideline.  Consider how old the domain is and how long it’s been developed.  The younger the domain and how long it’s been developed will reflect on it’s price as well.  If the site is relatively new and hasn’t built a market then it’s harder to determine it’s potential value.  One will have to do market research to determine the potential for growth for the site.    Also, take into consideration the untapped potential hidden behind a poorly developed site.   Here we can apply the real estate analogy, a developed site is like a developed piece of real estate.  The existing building being the existing website, how well has it done and is there potential to a remodel to better serve the customer.  I believe the analogy works well with developed domains.

To summarize, when considering the value of a developed domain, look at existing traffic and how well implemented the site has served it’s customers.  Demand for your domain will be higher if you have more traffic.  Is there a need to better the site to better serve the customer.   Improving a sites appearance and functionality to increase traffic will increase it’s value.    Remember, a bad site will drive away traffic and diminish a domains value.

You should already be familar with Wordpress, and if you think you aren’t familiar with wordpress little do you know that you’ve come across many websites using wordpress. This site is a good example of what a wordpress site looks like.  Not happy with what I found through searching through the templates available at wordpress’s themes page, I finally found what I was looking for at dailyblogtips.com.  I joined the mailing list and got their wordpress themes package for free.  You get about 12 great themes for joining and they are perfect for mini-site development if you plan on incorporating affiliate ads into your wordpress site.  You also get some great plug-ins along with the download.  Plug-ins are “features” you can add to your site to give that extra cache that really takes it to that next level.

This site is using Studiopress  Red which has some integrated spaces for adding your ads directly into the page marked “adsense_sidebar160.php.”  Log into your wp-admin page to access the settings pages.    Get your code from your affiliate program, making sure it’s 160×600 pixels, and copy and paste it into the space provided.  Nothing could be easier.

Adding other ads

You can also add a few other ads into your sidebar such as the 125×125 buttons I’ve added here on the side.   From your wp-admin page, go to the “Appearance” option on the left, click on editor and find your sidebar.php file.  Once in, look at the information that is there and look for what you see on the sidebar from the website and look for the php code that relates to that information.  For example, on the side of the webpage you’ll find a heading of “Archives” and in the code you see the following that relates to it:

<li>
<h2>Archives</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>
</ul>
</li>

The heading is the <h2>Archives</h2> part and you can create a new heading by doing the following, just be sure to place this after where you want it located:

<li>
<h2>New Heading Goes Here</h2>
</li>

Find where you want the new ad button to go, after what heading, and paste your ad code in this location.  Refresh your website page to confirm it’s been posted in the correct location.

Changing Image Files on Your Site

I’ve customized this site a bit by adding a few of my own image files.  For example, the small “dp” up above in the welcome area on top on the right was originally another image.  The original image was welcome.gif.  To change this, I uploaded the new image file that I wanted to the wp-content/themes/studiopressred/images/  folder and found where the welcome.gif is referenced in the php file using the editor option again and changed welcome.gif to myfilename.gif to get it to appear there.  You can also do this with any other images that appear on the site, including the images used in the background.  Just find out what that file name is, find where it’s referenced in the corresponding php file, upload it your images folder, and change the reference to the new file name.

Get Some Site Related Content That Updates Automatically

Find a site that offers linked news that is updated automatically.  This gives your site some usefull information for the reader.  For example, Domaining.com offers a domain news html code that they update daily with the daily news.  Just copy their code, find a place where it’ll fit on your site, and paste it in that location.  Update the changes, and refresh your site page to see if you did it correctly.

Create a Mini-Site that Looks More like a Store Than a Blog

You can also create a site that looks more like a store than just a blog.  Sign up to become either a Ebay affiliate or an Amazon Affiliate and display their items for auction/sale on your site with site related items.  You can do this by purchasing a ebay/amazon plugin for wordpress.  The one I’m looking at is phpbay.   They offer both versions, Ebay and Amazon and both function as a plug in that you install into your wordpress site.  Once installed, you can customize it to display site related items that’ll make your site look like you’ve got site related items to sell.

So, seriously consider building a mini-site.  All the tools are out there to build a professional looking website and most of them are free.

Ok, so you’ve found a name that looks good but don’t buy it just yet.  How do you know it’s good?   You’ll want to do a few “test” on the name to see if it is worth anything already.  You can use a free online valuation service like the one at websiteoutlook.com or estibot.com to get an idea of what these site’s automatic appraisals think.  Use the figures provided as an interesting indication of what the domain is worth, but I wouldn’t expect the figure to have any real weight.   From my experience, that number means nothing but is pretty cool to know.  You can even quote it to someone interested in buying it but don’t expect it be what it sells for.  I say this because that site is using a predetermined setting giving differing weight to the domain keyword stats.  The site may value some criteria more than others.  Or, it may not even be reading the keywords right.  What I do think is beneficial from these sites is the information they provide to value your domain.

Estibot.com, for example, tells you some very important information for your domain name.  The first thing you should look at is if there is an Alexa rank.  Alexa.com is good site to know when researching domains.  Alexa keeps track of all domain traffic.  You can go to Alexa and find out what are the top domains based on traffic.  It will also tell you if that domain you are interested in buying already has some traffic and give it a rank.  The more traffic the better. Another thing estibot tells you is what the Pay Per Click (PPC) is for the keywords it detects in your domain name.  This is important because affiliate sites will use these keywords in determining what ads to place on your site.  Because some advertisers pay more than others, you’ll make more money with a domain higher paying keywords.  Estibot will also tell you the monthly google searches done on those keywords.  This is also very valuable because it will tell how popular those keywords are.  Another important bit of information here is the competition there is for those keywords.  Less competition the better because you don’t want to get lost in a sea of similar domains.

So, to sum up.  You want:

1.  A good name, as generic and short as possible, hopefully one that was recently dropped and has some traffic.

2. High paying keywords in the domain name.

3. Low competition keywords that are very popular in the domain name.

The first is through selling a domain.  You can sell it through auction sites like the one at sedo.com or godaddy.com.  The problem with these two sites is that there is an enormous amount of competition to sell and not much competition buying.  So, unless you’ve got a great domain don’t expect to sell it too high or quickly.  Another method is selling through Ebay but this method results in a lower selling price, much less selling competition though.   Another auction method is to try to get it listed at bido.com if they want it.   Bido sells one domain a day so this is the bottom of selling competition.  All focus is on your domain so you should, theoretically, get the best selling price.   Another way is to offer it out to interested parties.  Email everyone you can find that may be interested in the domain and make them an offer.  This should yield the highest selling price as you’ll be selling to the end consumer.  Less middlemen means you should get all the profits from the highest markup.

A second way to make money with domains is to park it.  Parking means to put it up through some parking service and let the site use it to put advertising.  A parked page has little to no usefull information on it other than a bunch of ads.  Parked pages are disliked by groups of people since they offer no value to the internet.  Their only purpose is to get “landing” traffic and hopefully the visitor will click on one of the ads allowing the site owner and parking hosting site to share in the click through revenue.  Click through revenue can be anywhere between pennies to as much as 30 dollars per click.  The amount will depend on what the vendor will pay for the advertising.   This is what you want to do if a site has good direct type-in traffic (not through search engines) and you don’t have the time to fully develop it.

The third common way is to develop the website.  It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate.  You can use free website developing tools such as those at wordpress.org and a paid hosting account at sites like godaddy.com. I’ll go into developing a professional looking website in more detail in another blog.   Here I’d just like to say that developing is another way to make money.  You develop it.  Put some valuable information on the site.  Something that’ll have people using a search engine to find your site.  Use the information you provide and hopefully click on affiliate ad’s you’ve placed on the site.  This is the best way to make money on your domains but is also the most time consuming.  This is recommended for a good site with a good deal of search engine traffic.

Now, the thing to remember is to not get greedy.  Don’t expect to buy a 8 dollar domain and sell it for 100K.  Those days are pretty much over.  What you can do is buy several 8 dollar domains and sell them each for 40 or 50 bucks each.  That’s a 400% return on your investment.  Or, if you park it hope to make 10 cents or more a day.  That’s translates to ~30/year on an 8 dollar a year renewal cost.  Figure having 1000 domains all making you a 22K a year profit and that’s some serious pocket money.  Or, if develop a good site, make 1 dollar plus a day in click through advertising revenue and make 350/year per domain times 400 domains and that’s some serious money.

So, to sum up, in no particular order:

1. Sell It

2. Park it

3. Develop it.

One site you can contrinbute to by becoming an “Expert” is Bido.  Bido is an online domain auction house that’s premise is to focus on one auction a day.  One domain get’s sold every day.  Before the sale, you’ll find posts by “experts” giving their opinions on how good the domain is and how well or poorly they expect it to sell.  As an expert, you can put a link to your site to provide some history about yourself.  Some “experts” are pretty accurate and I’ve found that by reading what these domainers think you can really pick on a few tricks of the trade.  Read these when you can, they do provide some good tips.  When you think you’re up to the task, become an expert yourself and start redirecting some traffick to your site.  Remember, one of the goals of search engine optimization (SEO) is to get linked by other sites to your sites.  This is one way you can get an external link.