There are many ways you can make money online, one way which you may not have considered, but where big money is possible, is by buying and selling domain names.
The idea is simple, you buy a domain name e.g. ZitBusters.com, you list it for sale, at the industry auction sites such as Sedo or Afternic (or possibly even eBay) someone offers you a vast amount of money for it and you sell it. Well, that’s the idea, the reality is somewhat more prosaic.
To sell the domain names you buy, you will probably need to actively market them i.e. find the e-mail addresses of people that you think may be interested in your name and fire off an e-mail. If you’re lucky or the name you have is an obviously excellent name then you will get an answer saying something along the lines of “How much do you want for your name?”, which is when negotiations begin.
So what is an ‘excellent domain name’. Generally, they are dot coms (dot coms are worth around ten times as much as dot nets) and they are generic e.g. shoes.com, beer.com, business.com.
How much are generic dot coms worth? Well, the highest sale so far in 2008 is Fund.com which sold for the tidy sum of $9.9 million, Invest.com came in at number 5 and sold for $1.015 million, NewlyWeds.com on the other hand was number 53 and sold for $130,000. Sales are reported every week over at DNJournal.com where you can also see a list of the highest selling names of the year.
You may have seen the iReport channel on CNN. Where did they get the name iReport from? They bought it from self-styled ‘Domain King’ Rick Schwartz for $750,000. Rick Schwartz is one of the most successful and well-known of the domainers in the domain name industry. Other big names to look for are Kevin Ham, who has a portfolio of domain names worth around $300 million, Frank Schilling, Sahar, Rick Latona, Yun Ye who sold his portfolio of domain names for $164 million and many more. All these guys have interesting tales of how they got to be where they are by simply buying domain names, hanging on to them for a while then selling them on for a profit.
So what sort of names should you buy? As mentioned above, generic names are the best but of course most of the dot coms are already gone. So if you want a good generic name you may have to buy it off the person who already owns it. Alternatively you can wade through long lists of names that are dropping (i.e. not being renewed) at places like TDNam and Snapnames. Or of course you can try and discover a gem that no-one else has registered (very difficult as all dictionary word dot coms were registered long ago).
A word of warning, some registrars are unscrupulous and if they see you have looked for a name but not registered it, they will then ‘reserve’ it for you, by which they really mean block it and sell it to you for an inflated price. Do a search on network solution front running. Godaddy are the biggest for registering domains and they seem to be OK, but if you do find a good name that isn’t registered you would be well-advised to register it quickly as there are very few secrets on the Internet. The price for registering a dot com is around $10, but do a search for ‘discount codes’ and you will probably find coupons that will give you a 20% discount. If you use the code 199TEST with Godaddy you should be able to register a domain name for 99 cents, but it only works once. Bear in mind also that there is a 5 day ‘grace period’ and if you change your mind registrars will often cancel your domain name and refund the fee if you ask nicely.
More words of warning, steer clear of trademarked names i.e. stuff like Google, Microsoft, Armani etc... you will only cause yourself a lot of trouble.
While waiting for your names to sell you can either develop the name into a blog or a site or you can ‘park’ them . Parking them is a simple way of creating a page with some ads. on which may or may not bring in some money while you wait to sell your domain. You need to sign up with a ‘parking’ company. The easiest one to sign up with is Namedrive. In an interesting development Google has decided to set up its own parking service. This after previously criticizing parking companies as offering no value and being of no use etc.... Now that Google has set up its own parked pages it appears that parking domain names is cool. Go figure. (From what I hear though, most domainers are not recommending Google’s parked service due to the many complications involved.)
For more information about the whole domain name business you can visit forums like NamePros. To see what sort of prices domain names have been selling for check out DNSalePrice.
This is only an introduction to domain name trading but it gives the basic ideas. There are people who have made millions from domains, and in my opinion successful domainers make lots of money but it does take a lot of work, particularly if you are just starting out.
Building a website to earn Google AdSense advertising revenue has become a popular way to make extra money online nowadays. It is easier to earn AdSense income versus generating sales by selling products or services online. However it does involve works, time and money before you start earning from Adsense program. Below are the steps to creating a content website for earning AdSense revenue.
Step 1
Decide the content of your website. You can write a topic or subject related to your interest, hobbies or experience. You can also provide educational information and advice on your website if you are expert at something.
Decide the content of your website. You can write a topic or subject related to your interest, hobbies or experience. You can also provide educational information and advice on your website if you are expert at something.
Step 2
Use a website builder to create your website. One of the easy-to-use website builders that can help you build a website is Bluevoda website builder. Bluevoda site builder allows users to build a website without technical knowledge. You don’t need to build your site from scratch. The trick is to use a free professional template provided by the site builder and then start adding your text and links to your website. You can add some graphics and pictures to make your site look nicer. After completing your website project, your next step is register a domain name and sign up for a hosting account to publish your website on the Internet.
Step 3
Join Google AdSense program. It will usually take several days for Google AdSense team to review and approve your site. If Google accepts your application. You can start learning how to generate AdSense code for inserting to your website to generate Adsense revenue. If your site rejected by Google, don’t get upset easily. Google will let you know the reasons of the rejection. You can fix the problems and reapply again.
Step 4
You need to drive targeted Visitors/Traffic to your website to generate Adsense revenue. The higher your website’s traffic the greater your Adsense earning will be. Below are some of the ways that can help you drive some traffic to your website in short period of time.
1) Use Per-per-click (PPC) advertising. The two most popular PPC search engines are Google and Yahoo. Google and Yahoo can deliver instant traffic to your website but it is costly to advertise on Google and Yahoo. There are other alternatives like Bidvertise.com and Clicksor.com which are cheaper to advertise with.
2) Introduce your site to your family and friends.
3) Write several articles with a link to your website on the resource box and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.
4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted.
Google AdSense program has made it easier for webmasters to make money through a website. Webmasters who run an AdSense campaign will display Google's contextual Ads relevant to the content of their sites and thus encouraging visitors to click the ads and earn money for each ad click.
However you will earn very little AdSense revenue if you don't know how to optimize your AdSense ads on your website. Here are some tips to increase your AdSense earning:
1. Focus on one Adsense ad format. The Large Rectangle (336X280) ad format seems to work better than other ad formats because this format tends to result in higher click through rates (CTR). Another reason is that the ads will look like normal web links that visitors use to click on them. It doesn't matter whether the visitors know that they are clicking AdSense ads or not, as long as there are clicking, you earn AdSense commission.
2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Select a color that matches your website's background. If your site's background is white both, the color of ad border and background should set to be white too. Also the color of the ad title should be similar to coloe of the links in your website. This is to make your AdSense ads look like it is part of the web pages. Again, this will boost AdSense CTR.
3. Don't place your AdSense ads at the bottom of your webpages because it is proven to be less effective. Displaying your AdSense ads at the bottom is like hiding your AdSense and thus leads to low CTR and AdSense revenue. Try to put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between AdSense locations can make when you see your earnings.
4. Try to place your AdSense ads near rich content as visitors main focus usually are your content. There are several ways to insert AdSense ads into your content and one of the ways is place your AdSense just after the end of your content.
5. Try to automate the insertion of your AdSense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your AdSense code in a text file, name it as “AdSense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then use SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.
These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites.There are other ways to optimize your AdSense that produce high CTR also. You can learn more tricks by reading in AdSense and webmaster forums.
I have seen quite a lot of AdSense publishers posted in different forums stating that their AdSense accounts were banned by Google due to fraudulent clicks. Most of these people claim that they are innocent and have never clicked on their on AdSense ads. So they have no idea why click fraud can occur on their AdSense accounts. The truth is click fraud can happen in several ways and not necessarily caused by the AdSense publisher himself/herself who accidentally clicked on his/her own AdSense.
Below are some of the tips to protect your AdSense account:
1) Do not use autosurf programs to promote your websites that contain AdSense. Autosurf programs can substantially increase your website traffic or hits, AdSense page view and ecpm but people who surf your site only to earn advertising credit or other type of incentives. So the traffic generated from autosurf programs aren't counted as real and thus against AdSense policies.
2) If possible, do not involve in any traffic exchange networks and programs. If you have join one or more programs or networks that can make you a steady AdSense commission, you should start worry about your AdSense account as this could mean that members of the program(s) were clicking each other AdSense ads all the while whether intentionally or unintentionally. As soon as Google detected a group of people were clicking each other AdSense, many of the members AdSense account in the program will be suspended. Also traffic exchange can be another mean to artificially generate tons of unreal website traffic or hits and boost up AdSense page view & ecpm and it is strictly prohibited by Google.
3) Do not join AdSense exchange networks. They are similar to traffic exchange programs except members are participate just for clicking each other AdSense. This should be a guaranteed way to be banned by Google.4) Read all the Google AdSense policies at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link&hl=en_US to see whether you have against any policies and make the necessary modification.