Beginners guide to Domaining

SEO is all about creating the perfect blend of optimised content for your website in order to gain the maximum traffic your site can possibly achieve, with the minimum amount of effort. Because of the enormous benefits of SEO a great many people want to learn its secrets in the hope of finding some magic key to earning revenue for doing little or no work. I’ve already written numerous blogs on the subject of earning money from your website explaining how this is achievable, but it’s not the easiest way to earn money online.

Oh no, there is in fact a way to earn money with even less effort, a lazier and more defensible method for earning revenue; Domaining.

Let’s just explain the word defensible for a moment. A revenue stream from a website that relies 100% on organic search from Google isn’t very defensible, because if Google were to change its algorithm or your website were to get banned your revenue would disappear, just like that. If all of your revenue comes from one contract in the real world, and you lose that contract the same thing happens. You’re dead in the water. Having a defensible method for earning revenue means that you are not reliant on just one, or indeed a select few different factors for your earnings. You are able to cope with changes in algorithms, loss of rankings, being dropped from programmes etc. Your revenue stream is defensible.

The act of Domaining is very defensible; as we’ll go onto explain in a moment. First of all, what is Domaining?

Domaining is very similar to buying property in the real world, be that buy-to-let, property development or even buying somewhere to live. Domaining is the practise of purchasing domain names with the view to profit from them, either by flipping (exactly as you would do with a bricks and mortar property) or holding onto them until they increase in value sufficiently for you to profit from them.

For those not familiar with the term flipping, it means to sell your acquisition immediately without doing any work to it, because you feel you have the contacts and acumen to make a quick profit for your outlay.

You can build up a domain portfolio in much the same way as you would build a property portfolio and even the purchasing practise can be the same with some high end domains selling at auction.

The similarities between the two extend to their defensible nature as well. Barring a huge house price crash, investing in property is relatively safe. You can speculate, with a reasonable degree of certainty that your investment will increase in value as properties have done, by and large for the past 20-30 years. Domaining is similar in its marketplace.

Obviously if you’re looking to make a profit with a domain name you don’t look to by a domain name that is at the height of its current trend, it will be expensive and is unlikely to increase in value. The same as you wouldn’t rush out and buy a flat in Knightsbridge and expect to make much of a profit on it in a few months. You need to look for those up and coming areas. Those areas that are cheap now, but in a few months might just soar in value. For example, with iphone.com recently being sold to Apple by a business man named Michael Kovatch, people have been snapping up domain names for every conceivable variation of product that Apple might release in future with the ‘I’ prefix. It is believed that over 4,000 variations of the iPhone domain alone have been registered.

Of course, the real business end of Domaining comes when you actually want to sell your domain. Who’s going to buy it? What’s it worth? Where do I get it valued? You can’t exactly pop down to your local town centre and ask for someone to come and look at it like you would a house or flat. Luckily there are many websites out there who offer to appraise domain names for you, some for free, some with a cost.

Take heed though that just like getting your property valued at an estate agents, the true value of your domain isn’t what someone says it’s worth, it’s what someone will actually pay you for it!

DnScoop for example is a website that offers you an automated valuation on your domain names based on a variety of factors such as PR, Links, Age of domain, Alexa rank (shudder) etc. Naturally this valuation is very rough, but it will give you an indication of whether your website/domain name has saleable potential.

The website also has a forum where you can list domain names for sale, either as domains or as fully functioning websites. You can also buy and sell domains from websites such as Sitepoint, who have a marketplace.  The website Sedo is a domain marketplace specialist, where you can buy, sell and auction domain names and websites. It’s free to list your domains for sale; you just pay a commission on the final sale.

With a little research, some careful strategising and a healthy wad of capital you could become the next Robbie Fowler of the Internet world. By which I mean you could own lots of real estate as opposed to getting fined for snorting the touch line in a Merseyside derby.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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