[newbie guide] Building domain porfolio with decent traffic
 

Hi. I?m going to describe how to create good portfolio of domain names that earns way more then registration or renewal fees.

It?s guide for newbies to get quite experienced and earn enough monthly revenue to be able to invest in more expensive domains with higher parking revenue or sale price.

At first I need to say what you need for kickstart.
You can start with very low budget but it won?t take you anywhere as you spend lots of time and don?t get far.
I think 500-1000$ budget is what you need.
Sure you can start with 7,5$ and buy one .com with low traffic and wait months to earn few $.
500-1000$ can make it lot easier and you?ll earn them back pretty soon.

So what else do you need?
1. brains :) You can?t always rely on pure statistics.
2. being calm, spend time to calculate revenue/costs. You don?t want to spend all your budget on junk domains
3. motivation -> you want to get good income from your domains so expect that you spend lot of time building good portfolio.
4. What I give you: Some good tips, tricks, list of websites you need to know and software that helps alot.

At first, there are basicly 4 ways to get traffic:
1. TYPE-IN traffic what people directly type into browsers. High quality targeted traffic but very hard to get these days as there?s almost everything taken. But still you can get some, if you know for example that there?ll be highly viewed new TV show ?Rob and Dave? then robanddave.com might generate some traffic

2. TYPO traffic - mistyped traffic - here you can get most traffic. If there is site with 50,000 unique visitors/day (UIPs) that got domain fineclothing.com, then maybe 15 people/day will mistype domain name and write finclothing.com or finecloting.com . Also someone write wwwgoogle.com instead of www.google.com so browser sends him to wwwgoogle.com domain (http://www.wwwgoogle.com).
Most of TYPO domain and variants are already registered (TAKEN) by other domainers that got good scripts that searches for such domains permanently. But you can still register good pieces.
For example, one day, megarotic.com rebranded to megaporn.com, but as Alexa rank has 1 day delayed stats, almost no domainer knew this change. Megarotic.com got about 1,000,000 visitors/day those days when they?ve changed to Megaporn.com . So I?ve quickly register few mistyped domain names, for example megaorn.com with ?p? missing, and domain got 80-100 UIPs/day.

3. Expired domain names with traffic - daily few 10,000s domains expire, most are expired domains that didn?t bring revenue so domainers let them expire.
But there are thousands of running websites, that their owners didn?t renew domain. There are quite common expired domains that got even 500 - 2000 UIPs/day and that?s huge. Expired domains traffic lower after few months but it can still bring enough revenue.

4. Non-existing domain mentioned somewhere - Quite rare, but it happens. For example in one funny video at youtube, one blonde mentioned her IQ test site at 906090-iq.cz and I?ve registered it and it got about 40-70 UIPs/day just from that video :)

OK now you need to know basics about determining traffic. You don?t get exact value anywhere.

Most important factor is Alexa rank. Alexa is company with own browser toolbar. Alexa counts every visit made by Alexatoolbar users that lands on any domain or even nonregistered domain.

From the amount of traffic each domain gets from people that uses Alexa toolbar, Alexa.com will determine which domain got what amount of all internet traffic and put rank to each domain.

Alexa rank 1 means highest traffic domain (it?s google.com), alexa rank 30,000,000 means least traffic domain. Alexa rank 1 means first most visited domain, Alexa rank 547 means 547th most visited domain.

But only small percentage of people uses Alexa toolbar so calculations are quite inaccurate.

For example if you got domain that has 500 UIPs and unluckily wasn?t visited by anyone with Alexa toolbar, you?ll have rank for example 25,000,000 but if you have only 50 UIPs but 3 of your visitors uses alexa toolbar, you?ll have rank 780,000.

Alexa rank only gives you kind of idea if domain got traffic or not.

For example if you have domain with Alexa rank 4,000,000 you can expect 20-100 UIPs/day so you know there is some traffic and it will generate some revenue.

Other factor making Alexa inaccurate is Alexa toolbar penetration. In USA, much higher % of people has Alexa toolbar then anywhere round the world.

So Alexa rank 15,000,000 with pure US traffic means 1-10 UIPs/day but Alexa rank 15,000,000 with Czech traffic means 5-200 UIPs/day.

S same Alexa rank for US traffic domain means less traffic, but on other hand, more valuable traffic as US citizens are good moneyspenders online.

Also Alexa got 4 different Alexa rank values -> 7 day average, 1 month average, 3 month average and 3 month change.

For TYPE-IN domains I would suggest you to calculate with 1 month average and 3 month average. 7 day average can be very inaccurate for low traffic domains.

3 month change means difference in alexa rank today and before. it might give you idea if domain traffic is rising or decreasing over time.

7 day average is important for expired domain names as it can give you idea about how fast and significant is traffic loss after expiration.

Overture - tool (2 or 3 years unupdated) that will tell you amount of searches on Yahoo.com, for example if you want to buy chromerims.com and overture give you result for ?chrome rims? 250, that shows how natural and frequent that keyword combination is to search for and it might give and idea how much natural is that combination for people to type into browser. Overture stats are given in software that I?ll suggest you below.

Compete.com -> Similar to Alexa but less responsive in actual stats and doesn?t have low traffic domains. Even more focused on US market.

Now let?s get to point how to get domains with traffic.

You can use various free online services, just google for ?expired domains? or ?deleted domains? and you get huge lists. There?s 50,000 domains deleted each day (deleted means expired but in stage when ou can register it, but often both of these words are meant for domains that can be registered now)

But how do you get alexa rank for all of these domains, how to get overture? Multiple alexa rank on iwebtools.com checkers check 10 domains at once, it will take iternity to check 50,000 domains.

Read rest at:
http://www.webmasterinter.net/2009/1...ecent-traffic/

Enjoy and leave a comment if you like it;)

It is true that it doesn't take too much money to start up a decent site. This is a good resource thread. Thanks for posting, zabijaq.

Fatfoo, this article is more about domaining and getting traffic domains and monetizing them with domain parking.

But you can get develop once expired domain and use it's backlinks and traffic to kickstart new project.

Or you can buy few mistyped adult domains with traffic and redirect them to your current projects and get steady traffic without work ;)

i hoped it would interest more ppl :)
whatever

I enjoyed reading it. I have never really played the domain game so it is interesting to read about.