Internet Business Daily

I have recently been learning the art of buying and parking domains, and have learned many things the hard way. This will be my first of a few domain parking articles, and is aimed to help anyone out there thinking about becoming a domainer.

For those of you who don’t know what domaining is, it is the art of buying domain names not to build them into websites, but to place specific content ads on them. For example, if your domain name is xbox360controllers.com, you would put ads on that site that relate to xbox360 controllers: simple enough. Here is an example of a lyrics site (kingdomcomelyrics.com) that I have:

There are only a few ways that people will come to a website without it having any back links of promotion. You can setup MFA (made for adsense) sites and buy keywords hoping that your ads will pay more than your payment for the keywords. I decided not to take this route because I wanted to become a domainer with as little investment as possible. The only other way that people will come to your domain is by buying a quality domain name. There are still a percentage of people out there that don’t know how to use search engines, they just type in what they want into the search bar. For example, if they want to search for car parts they will type carparts.com. This is where domainers come in. We buy the domains that we think people will type in, and then put relevant ads on the site hoping for clicks. This is basically how it works. Also misspelled domains work such as yhoo.com.

The first thing I have learned, which I’m sure everyone already knows, every domain name you can possibly think of is already taken! I have thought of hundred and hundreds of the most random and ridiculous domains, only to be discouraged when I find out they are taken. I have had some success at the same time. Here is my story so far.

I am currently buying domains from 1and1.com. I have seen a lot of bad press for 1and1, mostly relating to them over-charging people for domains. I have not had one problem with them yet, so I will stay with them because they are the cheapest. Also, I use namedrive.com for my parking service. 1and1 has their own parking service but namedrive not only looks better, but seems to pay more. So this is the current parking setup I have now.

I first started buying very random domains. I am starting a mapping site and decided to buy domains relating to maps, which were iheartmaps.com and iheartmashups.com. Yes they are very lame, and did not work well at all obviously. There were a few more poorly chosen domains, which I won’t even list here. All together I spent about $40 on my first set of domain purchases. Then I started thinking about what people would actually be searching for. The first thing that came to mind was lyrics, people search for lyrics on the Internet all the time. I then purchased doctorsadvocatelyrics.com (The Game’s new cd) and after a few days of having it I checked namedrive and wow, it had accumulated 800 uniques. This gave me the push I needed not to quit trying to become a domainer. Here is a picture of my domain stats for 2 weeks of last month. Many views, a few clicks, but not much revenue.

There was another problem on my hands now, even though I had been receiving clicks on my site, the CPC (cost per click) was horrible. I was getting only 3 cents every time someone clicked a link. I contacted namedrive and asked what was going on and they told me that lyrics sites don’t have very good CPC. I decided to try a different genre of music lyrics: rock. I purchased thepickofdestinylyrics.com and after a few days of having it, it started generating clicks. This site was getting 23 cents per click! Much better than my rap lyrics sites. I am not sure why exactly this is, so I purchased a few more rock lyrics sites and am waiting for the results.

My final conclusion to all this is that I will continue to purchase a few domains per week and see if anything sticks. If I find one kind of domain works, ill buy every variation of it and hope for the best. I have just purchased gearsofwarnews.com and gearsofwarboards.com. I want to see how gaming sites do.

This will be first of many posts to keep everyone updated on how my domaining business is going. If anyone has suggestions or comments please feel free to post a comment and ill definitely read it. Hopefully I find a domain name that works!