A career change

[MikeLL]

Hi everyone. I had been working for a boutique computer manufacturing company specializing in high-end gaming PCs. They attempted to compete in the Dell/HP - dominated workstation market unsuccessfully. As a result my 'business side of the house' sales position became untenable. Currently I'm teaching private guitar lessons. Hoping to increase my learning curve here on the domain front.

I have 753 domains mainly in the robotics, nanotechnology, fitness, augmented reality (AR), consumer, and business categories. They're a mix of .com/.net/.org and .us/.info/.me/.ws. The robotics and AR related domains anticipate a coming paradigm shift as these technolgies begin to radically change our world. Most of my domains are registered with Go Daddy and Namecheap. I'm primarily interested in selling them either individually or in groups. Most expire between April & June 2011. I may keep a few for development. I just parked them at Go Daddy, but am waiting for their tech support to get templates and links displaying correctly (right now only a template stub with no sponsored links shows). But from what I hear parking is basically dead as a viable revenue source

Anyway, sorry to be so long-winded. I'm excited about DNForum and all of the information available. Just upgraded from a Free to a Platinum Membership. Great to be here.

 

[DN BROKER]

Congrats on the upgrade and welcome to the Domaining World!

 

[EM @MAJ.com]

Welcome aboard.

 

[A D]

I just parked them at Go Daddy

Welcome to the forum!

The first advice I can give you is park your domains somewhere other than Go Daddy, try parked.com or sedo.com for better revenue.

-=DCG=-

 

[furca]

Welcome aboard. Here is my advice

1) Rent a VPS for $59.99/month
2) You can host all your names on the VPS
3) Develop all of your names into wordpress minisites
4) Put adsense on the sites, optimize the sites, build backlinks.
5) You can selll the sites or hold on to them.

 

[katherine]

Thanks for the intro and welcome to DNF

 

[DN BROKER]

Welcome aboard. Here is my advice

1) Rent a VPS for $59.99/month
2) You can host all your names on the VPS
3) Develop all of your names into wordpress minisites
4) Put adsense on the sites, optimize the sites, build backlinks.
5) You can selll the sites or hold on to them.

VPS is not needed. You can get shared hosting and it would deliver the same result. Unless your going to build a community based site, then you should consider starting with a VPS and upgrading to dedicated overtime.

 

[Argie]

Welcome aboard. Here is my advice

1) Rent a VPS for $59.99/month
2) You can host all your names on the VPS
3) Develop all of your names into wordpress minisites
4) Put adsense on the sites, optimize the sites, build backlinks.
5) You can selll the sites or hold on to them.

Can you tell me where can I get a VPS for $59.99/month, please??? Thanks.

 

[MikeLL]

Thanks for the 'Welcomes' and the parking and VPS advice. I've been looking at a VPS plan at Hostgator that was recommended to me. I may do that for a few sites, but I'm more interested in selling most of my portfolio to those who want to develop sits or resell the domains for profit.

 

[furca]

@Argie - I use ace-host.net. I've been with them since 2004. I've had a few problems with them - one hard-drive failing in that time- but they have great customer service. I've created over 100 support tickets when them and they respond within minutes. I have the $59.95 VPS incl CPANEL, WHM. Great company.

@MikeLL - For you, the profit is in developing the names. If you have a bit of time it's not that hard to do and can truly "create value" for your names. You could try selling them, but I would definately just develop all of them and drive traffic to them from search engines. Your call though. (Like, if you sell them I am afriad you could only get 20 to 30% of what you could get if they are developed).

 

[urlurl]

welcome - this is the place you want to start

 

[MikeLL]

Thanks for the advice, but I don't have a development background. I'm concerned about the learning curve.

@Argie - I use ace-host.net. I've been with them since 2004. I've had a few problems with them - one hard-drive failing in that time- but they have great customer service. I've created over 100 support tickets when them and they respond within minutes. I have the $59.95 VPS incl CPANEL, WHM. Great company.

@MikeLL - For you, the profit is in developing the names. If you have a bit of time it's not that hard to do and can truly "create value" for your names. You could try selling them, but I would definately just develop all of them and drive traffic to them from search engines. Your call though. (Like, if you sell them I am afriad you could only get 20 to 30% of what you could get if they are developed).

 

[furca]

I have 55 minisites and all are using the same template. As for wordpress, fantastico can auto-install your wordpress blogs. You'll just need to find a theme and add content.

 

[MikeLL]

Okay, thanks, that's great. I would imagine that building traffic to profitability takes quite a while.

I have 55 minisites and all are using the same template. As for wordpress, fantastico can auto-install your wordpress blogs. You'll just need to find a theme and add content.

 

[furca]

Mike,

95% of my traffic comes from google and around 50% of that traffic comes from Google images in particular, I believe. Of course, I am targetting the keyword in the domain. So, if my domain is "mydomain.com" then I would be targeting My Domain. Typically, I will also rank high in Google images for My or Domain (which has more traffic than using both together). I'm not targetting anything too out of rich - the keywords I am specifically targeting only get 50 to 100 searches a month - but by going after these keywords I am also ranking for others. Bottom line is that it makes sense to develop. It used to be about parking - but not anymore.

Each site costs me approximately: $8.37/year (domain) + $6/one-time (4 articles).

 

[MikeLL]

Okay, thank you, furca, really helpful information. To clarify, are you paying $6 each to have 4 articles written for you? How often do you need to add new content? Who do you recommend for the article creation?

Mike,

95% of my traffic comes from google and around 50% of that traffic comes from Google images in particular, I believe. Of course, I am targetting the keyword in the domain. So, if my domain is "mydomain.com" then I would be targeting My Domain. Typically, I will also rank high in Google images for My or Domain (which has more traffic than using both together). I'm not targetting anything too out of rich - the keywords I am specifically targeting only get 50 to 100 searches a month - but by going after these keywords I am also ranking for others. Bottom line is that it makes sense to develop. It used to be about parking - but not anymore.

Each site costs me approximately: $8.37/year (domain) + $6/one-time (4 articles).

 

[furca]

Mike,

I'm paying $1.5 per 300 word article. I've never had to add new content yet to these sites. Eventually, I may turn each site into a blog on the first page and add content every few months - but I have some sites still making $$ after a year. I will PM you my source for the articles. Please keep it on the DL.

 

[Eraser]

Developing a domain name is a good idea. It will increase it's value. You can get free back links from social bookmarking websites.