Domain Development: How to Make Money From Your Website
The domain community is still trying to digest the recent step taken by Google to open the domain parking channel directly to domainer owners. Domainers can’t seem to have enough of the discussion.
Domain Parking can be a great way to make money without lifting a finger. The parking company already designed the template and supplies the ads. Mostly likely, the hardest thing you would have to do is to simply point your domains to the parking company’s servers.
As parking companies become more unscrupulous and brazen in their practices of unfairly splitting revenues, a lot of domainers are now actively looking for alternative methods of monetizing their domains and websites.
A lot of people are talking about development. Development can be quite exciting, but it does cost time and money. When you develop a website, you need to find a way to let the website earn you money while you sleep.
Unsurprisingly, it seems like the default method for most domainers is to stick a bunch of Google ads in the corner of the website and then hope for the best. People do make money from Adsense. Some earn very serious incomes as well.
However, you have to have loads of traffic hitting the website. The design and feel of the website also play a key part in having visitors noticing the Google ads in the first place, before they can even click on the ads. This takes a lot of tweaking and skills. This method of earning serious money is not child’s play.
However, there are quite a few ways to monetize the traffic going to a website.
Affiliate Marketing
This is where you sell other people’s stuff. You simply place a link or banner on your site, and if your visitors click through to the affiliate website and make a purchase, you end up earning a commission. We will update our eBusiness Resources area soon with some great affiliate networks you could join.
Sell You Own Product
This is where you could sell your own products and/or services, such as accountancy, ebooks or wedding planning services.
Dropshipping
This is where you would accept the payment for a product, and then have the manufacturer deliver directly to the customer. This saves you having to hold inventory or to ship products. You spend more time marketing, rather than offering customer services.
Software and Info Products
If you have software development skills, you could create and sell your own software/script.
You could also create an info product, such as an ebook on a subject matter that you have expert knowledge in.
Become a Reseller
This is where you obtain the rights to resell a product. This can be quite costly for you to buy the reseller rights/licence, but if you choose the right products and promote them well, this method could be far more profitable than affiliate marketing.
Summary
Regardless of what you choose to do, you could end up making much more money than what you would have made via domain parking. In some cases, you don’t even need fancy websites. Just a very good sales pitch.
To be successful in internet marketing using your own website, you will need to master the art of branding. The very first step in building a successful brand is to acquire a quality domain name.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I was tickled that you included dropshipping in this post. I’d like to find a quality info product to re-sell on dropshipping.com as I’m no expert on the topic nor much of a writer.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:04 am
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today oneBusinessDomains Blog » Domain Development: How to Make Money From …Here’s a quick excerptYou spend more time marketing, rather than offering customer services. Software and Info Products If you have software development skills, you could create and sell your own software/script. You could also create an info product, … [...]
December 16th, 2008 at 2:02 am
You last line could have been your first step “The very first step in building a successful brand is to acquire a quality domain name.”
If you start there everything else takes less money, time and effort although time and effort are up to you. Learn from the pros that use very little money but are efficient in their formulas to gain traffic. Use the search engines to promote your content at the beginning. We just put up a new Banana.com using a $65 skin, Dreamweaver and Ulead Photo Impact for construction of a static site. Took about 12 hours to put together. From there just replicate other sites/domains into your own network. Think top of the pyramid first and build down.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:27 am
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
December 16th, 2008 at 8:05 am
John,
Wow! Dropshipping.com is a superb domain name for development. Thousands of eBay sellers seek info on dropshipping companies/sources daily. You could even research and compile a list of dropshipping companies and sell the list to eBay sellers.
You could also simply resell ebooks on dropshipping and eBay marketing, and place eBay links on your site as well. I am sure your domain would earn you more if you develop it. The people who make the most money on eBay are often those who do dropshipping!
Productless.com and Antishipping.com are 2 domains that I intend to develop in the same fashion next year. I intend to market/sell the resources that will help entrepreneurs find and market products that can be shipped directly by the manufacturer.
Michael,
Thanks for your great and very timely advice. I personally would have felt the need to spend thousands of dollars to develop such a superb domain name, but you have demonstrated that that is not really necessary. One can really achieve so much by spending so less, and even produce a great-looking site within hours!
Banana.com is looking fantastic and delicious! Not only will you retain visitors, but also you will have them coming back. Your work is truly inspirational!
December 16th, 2008 at 8:37 am
thanks for your post. i have started to develop my domains.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Dropshipping and reselling products looks very good to me, i’m not too found of affiliate marketing, i’ve been there and it didn’t seduce me, there’s a lots of problems, stolen commissions, sometimes from the product owner himself, and the ones who could stop that don’t really do anything about it, and lots of other problems.
I like dropshipping , reselling , renting advertising space and PPC when one has a lot of traffic
Anyway the most important always begins with a good name
December 16th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Helder,
I agree. Affiliate marketing is rigged with all sorts of problems. I have seen sellers using all sorts of tricks to avoid paying commissions. One should really do comprehensive research before deciding to send valuable traffic to an affiliate website. Nonetheless, if you find the right networks/partners and implement great marketing campaigns one could make serious profits.
Dropshipping is a very great way of making money. It is a win-win situation. The manufacturer does not have to focus much on marketing if they have a capable army of resellers, and the reseller does not have to deal with the hassle of inventory and shipping.
PPC still works. However, I find it hard to settle for $0.50 CPC when the advertiser paid $10. It’s my traffic, so I should be entitled to bigger slice of the revenue and more transparency.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Please share some example sites if you don’t mind.
Any script to achieve these goals?
Thanks,
December 17th, 2008 at 9:05 am
RKB,
Unfortunately I am not willing to name and shame rogue affiliate networks and partners here.
I normally outsource most of my development so am not too familiar with available scripts.