Buying and selling domains and websites for that matter can be very profitable, but I never bought any of my domains with the intention of selling them on again. I always bought domains with the intention of developing a site and monetizing it.
I have bought my fair share of rubbish, mostly when I’ve had a few drinks and it seemed like a good idea at the time! For example I was up late watching a series on TV called SKINS, which promised to be the next big thing for the British Youth. It was on C4 in the UK and I got very excited when I saw that c4skins.net and c4skins.co.uk were available. I did NO research and got carried away. Once I owned them, I started to check out what already existed on the internet in terms of fan sites, forums etc. I found that C4 was way ahead of the game with a fantastic site set up complete with great graphics, forums and information. There was no way I could compete with this so I shelved the idea, I actually turned one into my first affiliate page advertising the richjerk etc.
The lesson I learned from this was to do my research before jumping in with both feet.
The next lesson, and the real point of this post, is that I have found having keywords in the domain does so much more for SEO than any number of links or even content (this is my experience). This week I sold two of my sites, both with good keyword domains, as I have never had the time or inclination to promote and build links for them. I made approx $500 from the two sites which I think is great considering they cost me about $20 to buy!
site one – www.postalfrankingmachine.com was specifically bought to promote an offer which paid $100 per sign up. I had one of these during the year I owned the site.
site two – www.debtandloans.co.uk was bought originally to promote loan and mortgage offers, but never made any money so I added Adsense and made about $150 in a year.
So in total an investment of $20 plus approximately 5 hours of my time in total plus hosting for a year $30 (I can host a unlimited number of sites so this is an approximate share of one years hosting).
Profit = $750 – $50 = $700 or 1400%
SO even if your sites are not that successful, consider selling them on to someone with more traffic or just ability to promote and you can still make a good return.
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