One of the most critical components component of your success on the internet is your web-host. If your web-host keeps giving you troubles, you will not be able to concentrate on developing, promoting and monetizing your websites. Also, if your website is down, you will not be able to show any ads and that would translate into zero revenue for you.

Sure — you can go with the top-of-shelf hosts which provide 100% uptime but they cost an arm and leg. Since our objective is to keep our costs minimum, we are going to use cheap shared-hosts. However, a LOT of these cheap hosts often resort of tactics — which I call “Dirty Games” — to squeeze every bit of profit from their customers.

Read this post to find out how most of these hosts try to rip-off their customers and “Rules of Thumb’ for identifying and avoiding such hosts. And yes, I will have host recommendations from my personal experience with some companies. Let’s get down to business, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

Art Deco — while referring to my Domaining Strategy and Domain Development posts — asks:

Quoting a wise man “I keep an excel file with weekly details of how much traffic did the site get and how much money did it make from various revenue channels. If both don’t increase consistently, I know I need to get moving to grow these figures.”

With some sites it just seems like they plateau at a certain volume - maybe a 100 uniques/ month, maybe a few 1000 uniques/ month, but never enough to actually profit by either affiliates or ad cents clicks - and then they they just don’t grow much more.

It is hard to know whether to put some more time or money into them or sell them and move on. That’s what I was talking about - some way of judging what the potential of a URL is, and how many times to submit it, or add content to it, or let it be.

I assume you have to have enough domains running through your system that you develop some or list some for sale every day or every week, so when do you decide this domain is not worth holding?

Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff at DomainBits.com made a post about my domain development strategy and Sahar mentioned it on Conceptualist.com. Here is the comment I left on their blogs –

Yes, I agree with you that development takes a bit of effort. But the way to that and to scale-up the strategy is to outsource as much as you can — while making sure that you minimize the costs involved.

One of the first posts which I have made as a follow-up is 6 Ways Not to Go Broke Developing Domains — Lessons That I Have Learnt the Hard Way.

As I confessed in the article, I was initially forced into the strategy because of what I had on my plate — too many domains which people were not buying. So what started as a way to cut my losses turned into a nice revenue stream. The ROI was high-enough to keep me going.

You also have to remember that most premium domains and traffic domains are pretty expensive and out of the reach of a new-domainer who may not have enough funds to support the investment.

Remember the old saying - “Money Makes Money”?

If you don’t have enough money to get into premium domains, this strategy is a good one to boot-strap your way up and get a taste and experience of domaining industry.

The money that you make from these flips can be reinvested in whatever way you can maximize your revenue — which could be re-investing in other sites that you can flip OR premium and traffic domains.

It is all about finding what works best for you.

BTW Jeff and Sahar — thanks a lot for mentioning DomainingTips.com on your blogs. I appreciate it and keep up the good work!

Update - David J Castello left a very interesting comment on Jeff’s blog, reprinted below –

True, developing is a lot of blood,sweat and tears, but pound-for-pound nothing generates more revenue. There is one well know cyber-journalist who owns about 6,000 domain names. He told me that his one developed name generates 10X more than his 5,999 parked names. And some of his parked names are quite good.

The same goes for me and my brother. The front page alone of PalmSprings.com generates over 60K a month in revenue. We could never generate this much money from parking (unless it was Sex.com!).

Ever since I made my Domaining Strategy post, I have been getting a lot of comments and questions from you all. First of all, thanks a lot for your comments and messages — that is exactly what keeps me motivated to write here.

Most of the questions which you have asked will be covered in upcoming posts about traffic, revenue, outsourcing, hosting etc. In this post, I am going to answer two important questions -

1. How to minimize your development costs?
2. How to Scale-Up this strategy?

This post will be one of the most important — if not the most — posts in the series as it describes the mindset you need to succeed in the game. These points are essentially derived from my own experience developing domains over the last 9 years — so yes, they are street-tested.

Let’s get started, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

Even though I was on a vacation at a place with horrible internet connectivity on my data card, I could not resist myself playing a few pranks on April Fools Day. What I had only done for a few laughs revealed some really interesting things to me.

If you have ever been on WickedFire then you’d know how much we hate “get-rich-quick” eBooks and how swiftly we take actions against them. The last thing that you’d want to see is a WickedFire Staff Member and Domaining Section Manager writing a Get Rick Quick eBook.

But yes, I did! I claimed to be writing an eBook revealing all my domaining secrets and made an offer to people to pre-order it for just $7. You can see my thread and the funny-comments people made there by clicking here.

Another thing — when Jon had started a crusade against these quick-buck eBook authors, he had done so by openly posting a copy of the crap that these authors were selling. So to take the joke further, I asked a friend to post a fake download link for what I was claiming to sell. The link was a Rick-Roll!

The tone of comments in the thread was enough for anyone to see the joke. However, I was shocked when over 20 people contacted me via private messages, eMail and instant messenger asking for payment details for the eBooks.

I was even more shocked to see the key-phrase “lord brar ebook” in my search referral stats!

Com’on guys. I have not written any eBook and neither do I plan to anytime soon. However, this validated the fact that a fool and his money don’t stay together for long.

Remember - What Works For One, Doesn’t Work For Everyone and you have to find out what works for you by hit and trial.

I made this post claiming that DomainingTips.com has been sold. A lot of you saw through the joke and posted in the comments or ribbed me via IM or PM about it.

However, I actually received a few offers in high x,xxx range trying to out-do the current bidder or in case the sale doesn’t go through.

No folks, I don’t plan to sell DomainingTips.com anytime soon but it was pretty interesting to see the offers rolling in!

I hope you had a nice First April. Do tell me about your experiences and pranks in the comments.

TechCrunch is reporting that now Network Solution is hijacking traffic to the sub-domains to the domains hosted by them. From the post, Win Betteridge, who runs GotGame.com contacted TechCrunch with the following details –

For instance, app.gotgame.com resolves to a Network Solutions page with text links, including “Poker Tournaments” and “Texas Holdem Games.” The same is true of any other unassigned sub-domain. We have spoken to customer service a few times about fixing this problem…

I don’t know if this is standard practice for a hosting company, but this strikes me as another case of Network Solutions unreasonably profiting at the expense of its customers.

This is shocking and absolutely unethical — and no this is NOT a common practice by hosts but rather the greed of Network Solutions. The TechCrunch post has comments from readers which describes other Network Solutions horror stories.

But well, this is Network Solutions - the hypocrites of highest order - the guys who themselves do Front-Running while pretending to be fighting it and recently got sued for it. I wonder if they will ever stop being a Crook?

Hey — I need a favor from you! Can You Please Vote for DomainingTips.com as the Best Blog and DNForum.com for the Best Forum. Here’s the Link? =)

Thanks!

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. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time when I was extremely frustrated with my domaining business. I was seeing people sell domains for hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet I had so many domains which no one was willing to pay even registration fee for, let aside thousands. What was worse was that I was not making much money in parking either.

Whenever I saw the domain-sales charts I would cringe. What was I doing wrong? Was there a fault in my investment strategy? I had to do something about it or simply get out of domaining business. It was a do-or-die situation for me.

There is another thing — I hate failing.

So, I sat-back to take a rational look at my investment strategy and find out what was wrong with it. And very soon I did. Read the rest of this entry »

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One thing which has been perplexing me for long was finally solved today. I finally understood what Twitter is and got addicted to it!

The issue that I had with twitter was that everyone was talking about how great twitter and microblogging was and getting addicted to it. However, whenever I would log into twitter.com and see hundreds of text-messages from people which I could not even imagine reading — at least without wasting half of my day — I just could not get my head around it!

Did all the top guys who had started twittering love wasting their time or was there more to it!

And the mystery got solved yesterday — when I downloaded a twitter client called twhirl. The moment I downloaded it, I realized how powerful twitter can be and how addictive it actually is.

The main reason why I could never understand and get used to twitter was because it was a headache to keep visiting twitter.com to check my tweets. The moment I downloaded twhirl, it turned twitter into an instant-messenger — or a big chat-room, if I may.

Yes, that’s right. Twitter is actually a Chat Room on Steroids!!!

You may call it a micro-blogging platform or anything else but if you think of it in the most simplistic terms, it is actually a chat-room where you can add people to your chat and start chatting. The difference is that all your chats are logged and shown on your twitter profile.

And one advice, don’t even try to use twitter without having Twhirl on your system.

PS: Follow me on Twitter.