Your host – Lord Brar – has invited the old simian to talk about selling domains.
So here I am, about to lay down the case study on my very first domain sales that just happened a few weeks ago.
I will take my building and selling and cross-reference it to his article, to see where I have done right, and where I have gone wrong and could have done better.
The niche was an easy find, “pink iphone” probably nothing but a rumour to get some emails for a marketing company, but what the heck, it pays 1.40$ for each lead, so I decided to market it. While the iphone is a big area, pink iphones – also due to their non-existence – can be classified as a medium niche.
I did not get the greatest of domains, but got it anyway. Ugly S.O.B. was hyphenated, but had the keywords in it that I needed.
Costs: 9.29$
Revenue: 0.00$
Profit: -9.29$
Slap wordpress on the domain, install the google sitemap plugin, choose a pink theme, put ads on the site, done.
I wrote about 14 posts and published them over the course of a month. A general description of the CPA program, and various related items – pink iphone skins, pictures of pink iphones, YouTube movies, etc..
I dugg and reddited the site 3 times in that month. (All you need are some friends). I also included it at a few social bookmarking sites and stumbled it as well.
At the end of the first month, I had made 19.6$ in income with the site.
After that, I decided to sell the site, as iphones are not really my thing.
After no one was interested after 3 days, I decided to reinvest 20$ in a stumbleupon service for 200 stumbles.
Costs: 29.29$
Revenue: 19.60$
Profit: -10.32$
Shortly afterwards, someone contacted me and bought the site for 60$
Costs: 29.29$
Revenue: 79.60$
Profit: 50.31$
I also sold another site to the same contact, but that is another story.
What went wrong: Not letting the site ferment – Maybe you already noticed it, but I had no faith in the site and did not let it ferment for long enough. That is a complete step I omitted.
Crazy Google – The site went up and down the rankings like an indecisive whore’s underwear. Literally page 1 to page 50 and back in days.
What went right: Promotion – Even before the sale, the promotion was doing fine, pulling about 1K visitors to a completely new niche site.
What could be done better:
More content – More content on a consistent basis.
Fermenting – As said before, selling this site in 3 months instead of after 1 could have been way better.
Contrary to popular belief, this was really not that hard. You can do it! Go!
Read more from the senile simian search engine sensei over at BlindApeSeo.com.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Good Show! Now all you need to do is rinse and repeat! =)
April 8th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Already on it. This time with some better domains.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Nicely done. One little question, what is the (cheapest) solution for the website hosting portion of the plan?
Debbie
April 8th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Debbie — the next post will answer your question. There are too many gotchas involved in blindly choosing the cheapest solution available. I will have recommendations in the next post.
I will be doing a detailed post on every aspect of the strategy and create an exhaustive guide – stay tuned. In case you haven’t joined the newsletter yet, I’d strongly recommend that you do.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Hi Debbie.
I am with.. nope, it does not matter which host I am with. The point (and why I did not include the hosting costs) is that with most hosts, you can host unlimited domains.
So even if it costs you 10$ a month to host, after 20 domains, that is (just) 50cents per domain.
::emp::
April 8th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Hi Emp, I am really happy that my stumbles service did help you in the sale of the site. Lord, nice case study. It is actually very easy to flip some niche sites, at the end of day we all want money.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Excellent! Thank you. I signed up for your newsletter this am. Im looking forward to future posts and an “exhaustive guide” on the revenue stream aspect.
Affiliate links, CPA links, contextual advertisements etc, some in-depth “how-to” in this realm would be great.
Debbie
April 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Absolutely Debbie! Revenue part is one of the most important aspect of making your sites an easy sell, so you can be sure to read some good stuff about this particular topic. =)
Rock on and thanks for being a DomainingTips.com reader!
April 17th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Thanks for the case study. Just out of interest, what stumble service did you use, and are those services still effective?
April 21st, 2008 at 1:09 am
I used amit’s stumble service. You can find him at WickedFire.
It did generate some traffic right away, but I can’t tell you about the long time effects, as I sold the site shortly afterwards (2 days).
::emp::
April 21st, 2008 at 3:05 am
I will be soon starting to offer these services via DomainingTips.com — giving final touches to it with my staff and my service providers. =)
August 15th, 2008 at 3:48 am
nice case study. Thanx emp & Lord!
December 25th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Are these social bookmarking sites the same as social networking? I have never been able to use them as a promotion tool. I did for a little while with my space but as luck would have this was just prior to them starting to redirect all the links through their own script. Are there any preferrable ones out there? Can we have names please? I am not familiar with stumble either but I am guessing that I will be able to google it and find out what it is. Thanks for the info.
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:04 am
Her teacher was certain the student knew more than her written answers conveyed, so the teacher asked the student if she could explain what she knew in other ways. ,
January 16th, 2010 at 1:19 am
I can also vouch for Amit’s work on wickedfire. Good stuff indeed.
February 13th, 2011 at 8:54 pm
Awesome post! I am a young entrepreneur and I’m just getting my feet wet in this business. This article really helps put in to perspective how simple selling domains can be.
Thanks for the motivation! I will be subscribing!
-Goose