30 Day Challenge

Hello avid readers!

Throughout August there is the Thirty Day Challenge. This "challenge" is a series of videos that describe how to set up a domain and make money from it. Various tools are explored and you will learn all about search engine rankings and how to boost your position in them.

My site is called Waterproof Digital Camera Housings.

If the world of the web and online marketing seems a little wild, then I suggest heading over to the Thirty Day Challenge and signing up. It doesn't matter if you are late: it is not a race. But it is important you stick with it. The first few days are hard, really hard, but it gets easier and soon you will be on your way to monetizing domains and learning a lot in the process!

ok one more time, at least...

It has been two months since I decided not to continue with this blog, but thought I would just check up on things to see if anything interesting has happened.

Adsense for Domains pulled in around $1 last month. That could more or less pay for that domain over a year. No profit though, just break even!

Sedo has amassed a total of 2.7 euros for me! So not much luck there.

I will reconsider firing up this blog again soon. With at least a couple of people finding me lately it has given me some motivation to fire up the engines and give it another go!

The end is nigh!

Well all good (and bad) things must come to an end. So far in May I have less than 1 euro on Sedo, and 44 cents in Google Adsense. The blog doesn't have any followers, or comments, so I can only guess that I'm the only one out there interested in it :-)

I'm going to cut my experiment short and not continue blogging here for a while. As much as I want to keep searching for that "killer domain", that will at least help me break even, I haven't found it yet. But I will keep my eyes and ears out for new trends and potentially hot domain names that might help get me back in the game.

Cashing in on Swine Flu

Speaking of cashing in... I wonder who got swineflu.com? It turns out it was registered back in 2000, and not during the last few weeks of panic. If you want this kind of information go and have a look at the domain tools web site here.

This tool is very cool. You can do the usual 'whois' query without trying to decrypt those silly distorted letters. More useful is you can see how many people have held on to the domain. When browsing through the deleted domain lists (such as Just Dropped, and use Bug Me Not to get a login) you often see interesting domains and wonder whether they would work. That whois domain tool might indicate that the domain has changed hand 4 times: and why would anyone let a domain lapse if it was making money, let alone 3 more times?

Cashing in on Windows 7

With Windows 7 approaching I thought I might be able to grab a domain or two and cash in on the hype. Unfortunately I think I have missed the boat!

windows7.com was already taken, of course. Same with windowsseven.com, windowseven.com, and windosseven.com.

While a couple were snapped up in 2005 and 2006, two of them were only registered mid-last year. Unfortunately 9 months is an eternity on the Internet these days.

The early bird definitely catches the worm!

Monetization in the media

The April edition of Nett Magazine had a few articles that touched upon the issue of monetization, and especially, parking domains. On columnist, Stephen Murphy, has some kind of axe to grind with monetizers who snap up domain names and cash in on misspellings (anericanexpress.com) or common search terms (cheapholidays.com.au).

Actually it isn't quite the monetizers he is upset about. It is Google and Adsense, who are collecting a lot of revenues from advertisements outside it's own search engine portal. Sites with no useful content are cropping up and generating revenue from people clicking on the ads.

So what?

If people want to click on the ads let them do so! Nobody is holding a gun to the public's head, asking them to click away. It's not a crime. If people didn't find parked domains or low-content sites useful they would just close their browser window and go somewhere else. Obviously there must be some benefit reaped from having ads because the advertisers are not going to continue to buy them unless there was some kind of return on their investment.

I suggest making hay while the sun shines. For as long as we have an online economy surviving with misspelt domain names and sites without rich content let's be happy. If the online advertising bubble bursts, and it just well might, so be it. We had our fun and (hopefully) nobody got hurt along the way.

Google Adsense for domains result

Here are my April results for shopcoupons.info:


This site was only recently moved on to Adsense, so the figures aren't exactly representative of a full month, so let's go through the various statistics and understand them:

1. Total page impressions is the sum of landing page impressions, and results page impressions
   
2. Landing page impressions is the number of hits we got from visitors entering the site
3. Results page impressions is the number of searches conducted on the site (there is a Google search box on the site).
4. eCPM (effective Cost Per Mille (thousand) impressions) represents how much the domain is worth in revenue for every thousand hits. This figure can be used to compare the performance of domains, much like your Click-Through-Rate but in dollar terms (remember that some keywords are worth much more than others when it comes to ads)
5. Revenue is just that: how much the domain earnt me.