Selling domain names is becoming a big business these days.  What’s the catch?  The catch is in owning the right domain names and having a vehicle to find the right buyer.  What a given domain name is worth to one buyer is very different than what it might be worth to another. 

Case in point, I picked up TexasBreastImplants.com from an expired domain names list a year or so ago.  I thought I would get numerous offers.  I even called up a couple of local plastic surgeons that had no interest, because they did not understand the value of having a common search phrase-based domain name.

A few months went by with no offers.  I had the domain name parked at NameDrive.com displaying ads.  It was easily making enough in ad revenue to pay for annual renewals on the domain name and make a small profit, estimated at about $100 per year. 

NameDrive.com displays a small link on the ads page that says “Inquire About this Domain.”  When you click on the link it takes you to a web form where you can make an offer to the owner.  I always set the minimum sales price for every domain name I own at $100 to keep away the tire kickers.  This domain was worth far more than $100 and I’m never a motivated seller, as I earn six-figures from other online interests –a nice position to be in.

Then, one day out of the blue an unsolicited offer of $1,500 came in from a really nice plastic surgeon in San Antonio.  It was obvious from his offer that he was web-savvy enough to know and understand the value of the generic search phrase based domain name.  That said, and given my “never-motivated to sell” personality, we ended up agreeing on a sales price of $2,250.  Not bad at all for an investment of $7.05. 

I have many other examples of such success stories with domain name sales.  But you can see and witness first-hand yourself what I’m talking about with a quick visit to Sedo.com and review their “Recent Sales” near the bottom of their home page.  For example, on today’s home page, Sedo has confirmed that KidsPraise.com sold for $1,400 (give me a break!), BuyLamps.com sold for $2,775, eGraduate.com sold for $2,500 (a steal for the buyer), Looted.com sold for $4,000 (an overvalued one-word domain and a shocker), LogPosts.com sold for $3,288 (that’s almost impossible to believe), DogRule.com sold for $2,000 (you’ve gotta be kidding me!) and PokerClick.com sold for $5,000 Euros (wow!). 

Most of these are examples of what I’m talking about when I say that you’ve got to be very lucky and be matched with the right buyer at the right time.  One could sit on a domain name like KidsPraise.com or DogRule.com for several years without getting a single offer.  Thus, if you want to fetch top dollar for your domain name portfolio online it is very important to market and promote your domains via several means and modes.

Don’t let the title of this article fool you, making big money cash parking domains is not as easy as it sounds or seems.  Trust me, I know from experience.  My cash parking income currently runs in the neighborhood of $300 to $350 per month.  Not bad you say? You might want to reconsider your first impression when you hear how many domain names I’m parking.  Over 4,500 in all.  Thus with roughly $3,900 in estimated annual income from this source, that’s only enough income to pay the renewal on about 12.3% of all the domains I own.

Let’s investigate why this is the case.  First, I must inform you that I park domains I have not developed at NameDrive.com.  Although $3,900 per year is not much, the income I’m getting from NameDrive.com is far greater than what I’ve been able to experience at Park.com, Sedo.com, Domain Sponsor.com and Godaddy.com – four other reputable domain name parking services.  In fact, none of these 4 ever came close to delivering the level of income I’ve achieved at NameDrive.com.

Now let’s get back to why I’m not prospering well in cash domain name parking.  The short answer is that is not my business model and I never purchased a single domain name strictly to make income from cash parking.  But I can tell you I’ve learned a lot from my cash parking experiences.  I’ve learned that the domain names that make me the most money are domains I had once created an Internet site for and opted to discontinue managing the domains for one reason or another.  It’s absolutely amazing how long a website will continue to get traffic years after it is no longer a fully functioning website, and merely a parked page.   One site, URL1.com, was earning me $15 to $20 per month alone in cash parking, consistently, month after month.  In fact, it was doing so well in cash parking from getting an average of 950 visitors per month, I decided to take it live again about a week or so ago.  It’s now a new blog I’ve created.

From my personal experience of watching domains that were once functioning websites do well with cash parking, I am able to confirm and vouch that the business model all successful domain name owners use to earn cash via parking, and that is to only register domain names that have a recorded history as a functioning site and have not been blackballed by the major search engines, do make money.  Some can earn as much as $50 to $60 per day, but this is rare.  I can tell you that historically, URL1.com, never had more than 15 or so web pages in its history, and over 2 years after I shut it down it was still drawing 950 visitors per month as a single parked page with NameDrive.com.

Another excellent way to earn money from cash parking is with domains that are misspelled versions of a popular domain name or word phrase.  I read the other day of a misspelled domain name that sold for over $25,000 when it was learned that the domain was getting 17,000 unique hits per day.  Once again, finding these gems is difficult, if not impossible.  But thousands of domains expire daily that get several hundred hits per month, and this is by all means enough traffic to earn a nice profit from domain name parking.  Like I say, this is not my business model, but I’ll share more on what I do to earn income online from owning hundreds of domain names in future posts.

I just love Wordpress.  A new site can literally be launched in a matter of minutes if you have a reseller account and cPanel hosting with Fantastico.  Web designers are not needed because open source designers have put literally thousands of Wordpress themes at download sites across the Internet for others to use to their heart’s content.

Need Google indexing on your site.  Just create a site using Wordpress and start writing original content and in no time Google will be combing your site.  The trick is to write original content and to write often.  In the past month I’ve created several new websites using Wordpress.  Examples would be my DCDomainNames.com and WatPros.com.  Both sites were created during the month of February.  Both sites already have Google, MSN, Ask, Alexa and Yahoo coming to them daily.  My DCDomainNames.com site already has 65 pages indexed in Google.  WatPros.com, which has less content and has 26 pages indexed.  The domain names blog has had 41 referrals from Google in the first 16 days of this month — not bad at all for a new site. 

Had I been creating sites the old fashion way, using HTML coding, CSS, Dreamweaver or FrontPage, there is no way I would have had this much success this quickly.  The moral of this story is this — if you haven’t learned how to use Wordpress, put everything else aside and promise you’ll start learning how to use it tomorrow.  It is very intuitive and easy to learn.  You’ll be forever thanking me for turning you on to Wordpress once you get the hang of it.

Who said you can’t make money with a blog?  I heard this question often after Google cleaned up its index a couple of years ago and started preventing spam pages from ranking high.  Google Adsense ad revenue among small enterpreneur web publishers, many who were using gimmicks, site builders and machine driven content to create thousand page plus sites on the fly, suddenly became aware that there really was something to “content being king.”

Content, specifically unique hand-written content, is what Google wants and the world is better for it.  Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN all love blog content.  Because, by and large, most (but not all) blog content is pretty much hand written.  Google’s “duplication detection” factors can quickly tell when a site is not serving unique content.  But if content is King, then blogs must be the castle’s that hold the Kings. 

That said, how does this all tie into my title, “Blogging for Money” you might ask.  First, I’m going to assume you know what a blog is, okay.  By now, if you don’t know what a blog is, you’ve must have been living under a rock the past 4 or 5 years.  There are now millions of blogs on every subject you can image or think of.  Although blogs started out as simply being online journals, they have become far more than that over the past 2 to 3 years.  And a growing number of budding web entrepreneurs are finding that one can make good money from a blog.

If you’ve got hundreds of pages and a lot of traffic on a blog you can make money running Adsense ads.  But one thing is for sure, if your content is good, like most blog content is, people will stop to read your content and not stop to read your ads.  If you content sucks and not what the visitor was expecting you will find that ad clickthrough rates will skyrocket.

Another way to make money blogging is to run affiliate program ads on your website.  My site, DCDomainNames.com, is a domain name blog that makes money 3 ways:  (1) Selling domain names, (2) Adsense revenue (in the content) and (3) Running affiliate ads (see the bottom of every page).

This new site of mine is just one fine example of how a blog can be converted or re-invented into a moneymaking website.  On my next post I will share more about finding products to market on your blog.

If you’re like most web entrepreneurs and own more domain names than you need or could ever develop, there is hopefully a high probablity that you’re starting off the New Year in 2008 with either a resolution to develop or sell domain names you’ve been holding onto for a while.  This focus of this article is on how to sell a domain name, but there are other options you may have not considered.  Thus, I’ll try to cover a full options for your unused domain names as well.

What most Internet entrepreneurs lack is focus.  Particularly the ability to focus all of their energies on the development of just one or a small handful of domains.  Instead, we frequently see great domain names become available, instantly develop a vision and strategy on how we can register the domain name, populate it with content and add web applications on it to generate a whole new source of income.  Problem is, as more domain names and moneymaking ideas come about these entrepreneurs quickly lose interest in the last domain name they purchased and redirect their focus to another domain name and moneymaking venture, that turns out to quickly becoming an “adventure” rather than a “business venture” as yet another domain name and idea drowns the focus on the last domain name registered. 

The sad reality of web entrepreneurship is that many Internet entrepreneurs spend more time dreaming and chasing rainbows than they do on concentrating and focusing their efforts on building one highly successful moneymaking website.  In the end they find themselves owning lots of great domain names that they renew from year to year, always saying “when I get around to it I’m going to develop this domain name” . . . “and this domain name” . . . “and this domain name.”

Let’s face it, if the domain name is as good as you think it is, perhaps its time you consider a New Year’s resolution to focus your efforts on building one large and highly successful website and sell off those domain names that are collecting dust and costing you money.  Assuming you’re willing to do this, how best can it be done.  I hope to tell you what to do and what not to do.  If you follow these instructions correctly you should realize a very healthy profit on the sell of your domain name.

Your Options for an Unused Domain Name

Please read these carefully, as you’ll quickly discover that not all my options have to do with selling your domain name.  Why?  Because it has far more value and can be sold for a much higher price if you can populate it with content and garner some Google and/or Yahoo indexing of your new site to boot.  Now you might be thinking I’ve lost my mind by suggesting you populate it with content, particularly if your sitting around with a hundred or so domain names you’re not using.  The the kind of content population I’m talking about requires very little time and effort.

Parking Your Domain Name to Generate Ad Income - This is actually a strategy I use to make money off of my park domains.  There are many parking services that will run one page of ads on your site and share the ad revenue with you, but few, if any, are better than NameDrive.com.  This is where I park almost all of my unused domain names.  You simply sign up for their free parking account, then change the DNS of your unused domain names to point to NameDrive’s servers, then they begin displaying one page of ads on your site.  In otherwords, your site now has one page of instant content takes only a minute or two for you to trigger happening.  Anytime someone surfs to your domain name address and clicks on one of the ads, you’ll earn a share of the ad revenue.  You won’t get rich doing this, but if you’re lucky you’ll find that Google and Yahoo will often index sites parked at NameDrive. 

Parking Your Domain Name With a Service That Provides Unlimited Content Pages -  I also park a few of my unused domain names at WhyPark.com.  This service actually costs you money.  It was $99 for parking a hundred domain names when I first signed up for it.  The beauty of WhyPark.com is that it will populate your empty domain names with as many pages as you can provide keywords for and they get quickly indexed by Google’s search engine.  Thus, if you want tens or hundreds of pages in Google’s index in a relatively short period of time this is a better way to go.  Also, if you plan on selling your domain name I can’t think of a quicker way to populate a domain with hundreds of pages of content and get many of them indexed than this method.  Others provide a similar service, but I can vouch that the WhyPark.com service works.  And, with tens or hundreds of pages indexed by Google that can be verified, you have significantly increased the sales value of your domain name by a huge margin.  How much depends on a number of factors and varies by domain name.  Some of those factors would be topic or theme, length of domain name, whether its a dot com, dot net or presence of hyphens in the domain name, whether its easy to remember, easy to spell, etc.

Selling Your Domain Name Through a Service - Many domain name owners quickly think of Ebay when they get ready to sell a domain name.  Although anywhere from 1,600 to 2,600 domain name auctions are taking place at Ebay at any given time, this is not a good marketplace for capturing the true value of your domain name.  Most domain name auctions on Ebay close with no bids.  I’ve actually tried selling domains on Ebay before and concluded after 90 days of selling domain names that I was only averaging $32 per domain name.  A good friend who regularly sold domain names on Ebay for several years gave up on it several months ago because he claimed average sales values plummeted below $20 per domain name.  In short, you will not realize the real value of your domain name selling it on Ebay.

So what services are out there that specialize in selling domain names for others or provide a marketplace for your domain names?  The four most popular domain name marketplaces are:

1. Sedo.com - see http://www.sedo.com
2. Afternic - see http://www.afternic.com
3. SnapNames.com - see http://www.snapnames.com
4. Domain Name After Market - see http://www.tdnam.com

My experience at selling domains at Sedo.com is that there is simply too much competition for your domain name to ever be found or seen.  I cannot vouch for what success you’ll find with the other 3 services, but do like the “auction” concept offered by SnapNames and TDNAM.com.  My best success has come through parking my unused domains with NameDrive.com.  Because if you flag your domains are available for sale, NameDrive will put an “Inquire about this domain” link on your domain name’s content page.  Anyone that clicks on this link will be presented with a form to complete if they have an interest in buying your domain name.  I set the minimum offer at $100 to ward off tire kickers, but typically sell most domains in the $250 to $2,000 price range, with an average sell of about $400. 

You’ll get far more opportunities to sell your domain name via the NameDrive.com method than via Sedo, but its far from perfect.  I have lots of domain names that are good but have never garnered an inquiry.  I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re really serious about selling your domain names you’ll find no better marketer and salesman than yourself.  Thus, to gain maximum value, park them with a service like WhyPark.com that will automate the process of establishing hundreds of pages of content, then waiting for several pages to get indexed and promote the sale of this domain name, singing accolades about its indexing in Google, etc.  In fact, if you take any time at all to create content, add a “Domains-for-Sale” sub-domain to your current website and write 2 or 3 paragraphs of content about each domain name you have for sale and start promoting the sale of them yourself.  Establish a realistic sales price you can hope to achieve with 6 months and welcome all potential bidders. 

A good way to gain an idea as to what a fair price would be for your domain name is to look at the home page of Sedo.com daily and read the postings of domain names sold the previous day.  They only offer a small sampling of domain’s sold, but the sampling is large enough and changes daily for you to soon bring your inflated values down to earth and settle on a value you can hope to acheive in a reasonable period of time.

Watch out Paypal, there’s a new Sheriff in town and his name is Checkout.  Unlike a lot of Google inventions that are introduced and then orphaned off on the web, Google is promoting its Checkout heavily this holiday season, and the results its seeing are outstanding.  Checkout is emerging as a serious competitor to Paypal in a big way.

 Although Paypal’s market share is roughly 96 times larger than Checkout, sales using the Checkout payment system over the 2006 Thanksgiving holiday weekend closed the gap by a large volume, dropping Paypal’s share from being 96 times larger than Checkout to only 38 times larger by some estimates.

 One reason for the sudden success of Checkout is that Google is currently offering merchants free use of Checkout through December 31, 2006 and has made special arrangments with some really big online merchants for the holiday season.  During the Thanksgiving holidays ToysrUs was offering $10 off on $30 purchases if you used Checkout to make your payment.  Google has also forged alliances with Petco, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Buy.com, Ace Hardware and Linens-n-Things.  All of these companies have huge online businesses, thus giving Checkout a real workout.

One major test for Google in the future is whether or not it can ever unseat Paypal as the number one online payment service, given the fact that Ebay is not using, recommending or promoting Checkout.  You may recall that Ebay purchased Paypal several years ago, so the battle between Checkout and Paypal is really a Battle Royale between Google and Ebay.