You can read my personal blog at lord.is. Here are some posts I’ve made there –

lord.is / getting rich with Felix Dennis’ 8 Rules

lord.is / books everyone running a business must read

lord.is / how to outsource

lord.is / Sex, Lies and Internet

lord.is / most important skill

Blogs: It is extremely easy to install wordpress, install a nice web template and start posting re-printable articles from sites like eZine Articles.

Forums: You can install vBulletin vBulletin or PHPbb, make some categories and let people create content for you. It is an extremely easy way not just to get content but also get good search rankings and develop a community that will get you long-term profits.

Gallery: Let people upload photos on your site using PhotoPost or Gallary 2.0 or Coppermine. Be sure to use the watermarking feature of these software to allow for viral marketing of your website.

Directory: You can make loads of money by charging people to get listed on your directory. PhpLinkDirectory and PhpLinkBid.

I will be covering this topic in detail in next few posts and talk about each strategy individually. Stay tuned.

PS: Yes, I know the newsletter link is broken and will be fixing it soon.

Guys — let me tell you a strategy which will help you sell more domains and skyrocket your domaining profit.

Start a newsletter - it is a very powerful tool and something that most people ignore. I have been running newsletters for some time now so I am talking from personal experience.

Learn how to start a newsletter, how to get people to subscribe and some practical things I have learn from my own experiences. Let’s get started, shall we?

To make much more money than you would without having one.

Let me explain how you will make more money by having a newsletter –

1. Stop Traffic Leak. Tell me - how many times have you felt frustrated when people so many people read to your listing and leave — to never come back again?

What is even more frustrating is that there is no way that you can get in contact with them again if you drop your price, modify your listing or have some other related domain to sell that you think they may be interested in.

A newsletter can instantly solve this problem. Once they subscribe to your newsletter, you can send them a message whenever you feel that there is something they may be interested in.

2. Building Trust. Internet is a faceless medium and building trust online is a difficult job. However, I have found that if you are in constant contact with people — either via your newsletter or your blog — and if you give it a personal touch, they start trusting you more somehow.

I guess the reason may be that they start feeling that they know you and that makes them more comfortable doing deals with you rather than some stranger who they know nothing about.

3. Repeat Selling. Here is something that amazes me — whenever people have something to sell, they will just go and post classifieds everywhere they can but never contact people who they have already done business with.

There is no rule in the book which says that if someone buys from you once, they can’t buy it again. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.

If someone has already done business with you, they know what kind of service and experience you can offer and they are more inclined to trust you and deal with you than someone who doesn’t know you at all.

As a matter of fact, I make a large part of my domain and service sales revenue from people who have already done business with in past. Having a newsletter makes it a one-click job for you to do repeat selling.

4. Cross-Selling. Whenever you sell a domain or a website to someone, that is not the only thing that you can sell to the person. There are so many other things like consulting, marketing services, design services and your other domains or sites for sale.

Do you want to leave money on the table by not having a newsletter? I guess not, especially since it is dirt-cheap to do so.

Sponsor: Sign up today for a 15 day free trial. Try iContact now!

You can start a newsletter manually by BCCing the eMail to everyone but it is not a practical way to do it. The hassles which come with subscribing/un-subscribing people manually, sending bulk mail and ensuring delivery are simply not worth it.

And no, you don’t get all the extra goodies like click-tracking, open-rate tracking and timed auto-responders — which make newsletter management and your life so easier.

What is recommended is that you use a third party hosted service like iContact or Aweber. Both are extremely cheap. Just subscribe to either of these and you are ready to rock!

iContact gives a free 15 day free trial if you visit this link. So I recommend that you check them out and take a free 15 day trial — you have nothing to lose.

Both iContact or Aweber offer timed auto-responders. If you are not already familiar, an auto-responder automatically sends messages to your subscribers at a specific time intervals.

For example, if someone subscribes to your newsletter, they will get a message as soon as they join. Now, you can write a bunch of messages in your auto-responder and the software will automatically keep sending them after specific time intervals.

The subscriber will think that you are regularly sending him or her the updates and will remember you.

The reason why this is important is because if you do not send a message to your list for a long time, they will probably forget you and that they had opted in to get your newsletter.

And honestly, it is hard work to regularly send a new message every single day. Let an auto-responder take care of that for you — without any effort on your part.

1. Give them Incentives. Take a look at DomainingTips.com Free Newsletter landing page and you will see what I mean. This page is getting us a lot of subscribers — and that is the bottom line. From the feedback I have had, most people join us for the free report and quality content keeps them subscribed.

2. Exclusive Deals. Whenever you sell someone a domain or service, ask the person if he or she would be interested in joining your newsletter. Tell him or her that you will send deals and offers before others have a chance to get them. In my own experience, over 90% of them will join you.

3. Forum Signatures. Add a link to your newsletter sign up page in your forum signature. If people like what you are posting, they would like to hear more from you and sign up.

4. Your Blog. If you run a blog, add a link to your newsletter sign up page at the bottom of your post. It is an extremely effective way to get subscribers. As a matter of fact, a blog is an excellent way to sell more domains but that is the subject of another post.

1. Screw Freeloaders. A lot of people will subscribe to your newsletter to get the incentives and instantly unsubscribe. The best advice I can give you is that you don’t take it to heart as to why they ub-subscribed — they are just bunch of cheap freeloaders.

2. Commies Are Not Cool. There are so many digital communists who want everything to be non-commercial and will send you mean messages whenever you try to commercialize your newsletter or your blog. My advice? Ignore their message and instantly un-subscribe them from your newsletter.

They are not worth your time and effort. There is no free lunch in this world.

If you have any question or ideas, feel free to ask me in the comments or Ask Lord Brar.

Also, Easy Link Building’s Link Building Tool has been getting rave reviews around the net. Did you buy your copy yet?

If you face any issues or find that something is broken, please let me know. Also, I may be trying a new theme in near future to test advertising effectiveness and a few new features.

Oh and another thing — I found out that Domaining Tips is now ranking #4 for the keyword Domaining in Google. Thanks a lot for all the quality links everyone.

Chapter 1 - The Shocking Truth about Domain Parking
Chapter 2 - How I “Really” Make Money From Domain Names
Chapter 3 - 6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains
Chapter 4 - Should You Fool Around With Your Domains
Chapter 5 - An Interview I did recently
Epilogue - The Unanswered Questions…

Read it online »

We have just launched Easy Link Building’s Link Building Tool. It is an easy way to build high-quality links. And if you are serious about making money from your sites, you need it.

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Link Building Tool lets you quickly search hundreds of links, analyze them and rank them according to the quality and ease of getting links — just with the click of a button!

For Screenshots, FAQs and more details about Link Building Tool visit EasyLinkBuilding.com

ImagesAndWords of Proftapolis approached me a few days ago for an interview. It was published today — you can read it here.

A few days ago a member on WickedFire who uses the moniker PFNetwork posted a thread about How She Made over $30,000 in 1 Month from Her Sites and is a pretty inspirational story about how to make money online.

I asked her if I could reprint her story on DomainingTips.com and she was kind enough to allow me to do so. Read on to learn how she did it and my own commentary on her story.

Early 2005, I got involved with freeipods.com. I went to forums, did my research, blah blah — I ended up getting about 3 ipods, over $3k in cash, and some other toys for “free” from this site and similar sites.

I’m sure most of you know how these “free” sites work — they’re not really free, they require you to complete a bunch of affiliate offers or refer friends to complete offers.

After doing my research I knew who was legit and who wasn’t so it enabled me to get a lot of free stuff. (PS — don’t use freeipods.com or any of their sister sites now — the company has turned into crap and will only give you headaches.)

So that started it. I bought my first free-ipod-esque script for $125 and set that baby up. Had 3-4 websites the first year, I think I earned about 40k. Not too shabby for my first real online venture. 2007 exploded for me though.

In the first 5 months my revenue was about $80k, with over $30k coming from the month of February alone. All from affiliate earnings.

Most of the revenue was from a new GPT website I’d opened. I’m pretty good at taking existing ideas and making them better — so people got wind of this new site I’d created and started to really go hard with my site.

Soon after I came out with this site, the copycats came out. I came across over 20 similar websites within the year, all of them promising better and faster. I think I lost my footing around this time because the revenue just wasn’t the same anymore after April.

Plus I admit — I got freaking LAZY, this is the WORST THING TO DO when you’re going up! You need to step it up even more and ENSURE your top position. I thought I’d be pretty set for life but it didn’t even last a year.

The copycats were just the beginning. There were a lot of factors but that was the beginning of the end. With a lot of stupid factors in place, my profits continued to slide down.

Right now I don’t think these types of sites will be making that kind of money for anybody… Maybe the top players but the field is pretty full right now. I have a guy working for customer support related stuff but I’m seriously thinking about just selling the whole shebang (got about 6 sites in our network) and just using that money for funding future ventures.

First of all, I have to commend her for being extremely candid with this post. It takes a lot of guts to confess that you screwed up — especially by being lazy. You can check out one of the sites she runs — Rapid Loot.

Here are Three Lessons that you can learn from her experience –

1. You Don’t Have to Invent. Now when you are starting a site — especially for the purpose of flipping — do not try to be perfect and completely original. Steal Ideas from others — and be proud of it.

Even Sam Walton wrote in his book “Made in America” that he would routinely go to other stores to find out what new ideas they had come up with and then come back and copy them at WalMart.

You don’t have to start with a flawless design — you can keep improving it while the site is working. And no, you do not have to create the next Google or YouTube. You have to create what your users want now and scale it up.

2. Keep Walking. You do not have a monopoly over ideas. If your idea is good, someone will copy it. The only thing that you can do is to stay ahead of your crowd by consistently innovating and improving your product or service.

Be on a lookout for new trends and what your target audience is up to. Ask them for feedback and what you can do to improve their experience. And, as the Johnny Walker tagline says, “Keep Walking”.

And yes, don’t be put-down by naysayers and other negative voices. Develop a thick skin and stick to your convictions. However, this is a matter for another post.

3. Don’t Be a Lazy Arse. Even if you are on the top, you have to work hard to stay there or someone will overthrow you. Consistently keep promoting your site and building new features.

Remember — there is a difference between thinking that you are working hard and actually working hard. The easy way to differentiate between the two is to watch your stats — if they are going up, you are working hard else you are not. Simple.

All the best!

Blank Czech, using Ask Lord Brar service, asks:

If I have a good domain, do you think it’s worth fooling around with if it’s my first real domain? Or do you think I should try and make a long term (>3 months) development plan for the domain. It currently gets 20-30 hits a month.

Blank, the answer is a Resounding Yes!

There is no reason to be scared of screw-ups. Remember the old saying — “Life is a Lesson You’ll Learn When You are Through“. That is more than true when it comes to domaining or, for that matter, any other business in this world.

I am a proud graduate of the University of Hard-Knocks and I can tell you that the best way to learn something is to go head-on and experiment.

To quote my friend Jon — Being too Careful is Just Plain Gay.

Remember — I may be telling a lot of stuff but do you think I want more competition in my best markets by disclosing those ideas here. I discovered what works by hard-work and hit and trial. You can discover those ideas too if you stop worrying about the results and start experimenting.

I know you are scared because you think that the name you have may lose its value if you develop it. However, if the name has type-in traffic, it is not going to go anywhere just because you have put up a site. It will only grow because now you will also get search-engine traffic.

And in case you don’t do well with the site, you always have an option of switching it back to the parking services — but I am sure you wouldn’t as development always beats parking in terms of traffic and revenue.

What I will recommend to you right now is that you choose a web host, setup a blog, write some articles, setup adsense, add affiliate links, build some links and let it ferment for some months. Mind you — SEO is not instant and takes some time to show results. Patience, my friend, is a virtue.

In summary — Yes, “fool around” with your domains. It doesn’t matter if it is your first one or one thousandth. You will learn something new every time you try out something .

If you don’t try out things because of the fear of breaking things, you will be losing out to those who are out there and discovering what works before anyone else does.

Yes, you can minimize your risk by reading how others do it but that comes with a disclaimer — reading too much can result in “paralysis by analysis” and you don’t ever want that. Whenever you see an idea that you think can work, try it yourself and see if it actually works.

Good Luck with your development effort!