Domaining

"Domaining" means buying and selling domains for profit. It's only tangentially related to affiliate marketing in some instances, but in other instances it's extremely pertinent. For example, if I buy a great domain name , I have a couple of options. I can try to sell the domain for a profit over what I paid for it, or I can develop it into a money-earning site via affiliate links or other paid advertising. A third option is to develop the domain into a moneymaker and then sell the domain and the moneymaking website. The third option makes the most sense to me.

I think that the traditional use of the phrase "domaining" usually only brings to mind that first option though. Buy a good domain for less than you can sell it for, and then sell it and make a profit from it. And that's not a bad business model. For example, let's say I register a domain name for the registration fee of $8.95 at Godaddy. And then let's say in 6 months, I turn it around and sell that domain for $500. I've made a $491 profit. That's a huge return on my money in that case. You can't get those kinds of returns in the stock market unless you're really tolerant of risk. And lucky.

But what about the other option? Suppose I launch a 2 or 3 page website, and I get 30 visitors a month to the site. (A combination of 15 type-in visitors and 15 visitors from search engines.) And let's say I'm working in a high dollar industry where I can earn $1 for every visitor to my site. That makes me $30 a month, or $360 a year...for the rest of my life probably. I'm 38, so assuming I last another 30 years, that's $10,800. That's not much over 30 years.

But it's a lot more than $491.

But let's say I work a little harder. Let's say that I write 1000 pages of content for the site, and I still make $1 per visitor. I like to assume that if I have a 1000 page website, I'll get at least 1000 visitors a day. Now that domain name I bought is earning me $30,000 a month for the rest of my life. That's a little over ten million dollars over the course of my life. That's a significant amount of money, even if it takes me a year to get that much content launched on my site.

Most websites though don't make $1 per visitor. A more realistic number might be 10 cents per visitor. (Higher in a competitive industry, but anyone ought to be able to make 10 cents per visitor to their website, I think.) That's still a million dollars over the next 30 years.

How many domains do you need to make that happen? How hard is it to launch and develop those domains with content?

My ideas about domains and domaining come from several places, but the person who got me most interested in domain was Andy Hagans in some of his posts at Tropical SEO. The man makes money the way I want to make money; without working hard at it. He also gave me the idea of taking these high quality domains and turning them into high quality money-earning websites that are worth far more than the domain would be worth by itself.

A couple of other items worth reading regarding domaining:

• How to Get Started as a Domainer
• Domaining Discussions at WebmasterWorld
• Sedo

Speaking of domains, I just picked up a domain about slot machines. I plan to spend some time developing that one into a real powerhouse of a site loaded with useful content. I've already launched a great page there listing 51 slot machine websites, and more content is on the way.