information Ways To Make Money From Your Domain Names

Most domain name investors concentrate on making money through selling domain names. For some, that is supplemented by using monetized parking.

There are some indications that the domain market may be trending downward recently. It almost certainly is down from the heights of the pandemic-driven transition to a more online economy.

Also, of late several parking services have readjusted earnings, and some investors, not all, are finding parking revenue more challenging.

While certainly not all of the possibilities I cover below will apply to all domain names, the following sections outline ways, other than selling domain names and parking, that you can make money from a domain name.

Rent Domain Names

If you have a valuable name that you would like to retain for the long term, but also want to generate substantial revenue in the short term, one option is to rent the domain name. While you need to make sure the rental agreement protects your name from abuse by the renter, this can be lucrative for certain names.

Dan allow you to choose Renting from the Pricing pane in My Domains. You can even have renting available as an option in parallel with buy-it-now, make an offer, and lease to own. One can also set up individual rental agreements, probably best handled by an attorney with domain name expertise.

Sell Redirection

This is only slightly different than renting the domain name, but another option is to redirect your domain name to another site, in return for a fee. The difference is mainly that you handle the technical side of redirection, and maintain the domain name with your existing registrar, as opposed to having a third party like Dan handle it during the rental period.

Both rental and redirection work best if you have product or service match names in a highly sought extension. However, you might also find takers for redirection of nice across-the-dot matches, for use in marketing campaigns or to grow traffic.

Develop Sites with Monetized Advertising

Perhaps the most obvious option is to develop the site, along with monetized advertising, such as Google Adsense. While you need development skills, along with expertise and interest in the topic of the site, the technical side of maintaining a niche site is not necessarily costly or very complex. Google Adsense now require that your site have content and some audience prior to being approved.

While you want to avoid a site that is exclusively AI-generated content, you can use AI-tools to supplement your personally created content.

One key point is to identify the niche for your site. You want a niche that will attract sufficient users to make the site profitable, but not already overdeveloped online, with room for your site to gain readers.

You can read about Google Adsense, while Matteo Duò has covered 22 Adsense Alternatives.

As well as the big providers, you can consider selling advertising directly on your site, as many of the domain industry blogs do.

Publish Promotional Content

Think this through carefully, including transparency for your audience, but one monetization option for an active site is to publish promotional content for a fee.

Directory Listing

If your site includes an expertly curated industry list, you might consider having listed companies pay for a listing, or perhaps pay for a premium listing.

This can also apply to individuals. For example, let’s say you have a site on some type of music or art. You can offer artists and musicians a directory listing.

Sell A Book

It is not easy to make enough to justify the hours required to research, write, edit and publish a good book. However, if you have a domain name that would be a perfect companion site for a digital book, this is something you might consider. Various AI-tools have made researching, writing, translating and editing books easier.

There are various options to sell digital products from your website. The site can provide excerpts or related content free, in order to bring traffic.

You will have to decide whether to use a traditional publisher, to self-publish, or use a hybrid platform. Since many self-published books do not go through a rigorous acceptance process, nor benefit from the same level of checking and copy editing, it is much harder to get self-published books accepted at bookstores or purchased by libraries. However, you have full editorial control in self-published books, including being able to promote and sell the book from your site. You will also get a much higher percentage of revenue than the royalties paid by traditional publishers.

Print on demand services make it relatively easy to offer both digital and print versions of your book.

Hybrid publishers offer some of the value-added services of traditional publishers, such as copy editing, marketing and a distribution channel, while allowing you to maintain more control of your product. A recent list of some of the hybrid book publishers is found in this article Best Hybrid Book Publishers.

Create A Course

Another option is to create a course, and sell memberships. This naturally only works if you have expertise and credentials in the topic.

While course creation used to be a time-consuming and daunting venture, AI-enabled tools have now automated much of the process. There are hundreds of services to help you create courses. This article in EdApp: 10 Free AI Course Generators for 2023 introduces a number of better-known, and free, options.

One thing to decide early is whether your plan to offer the course as a stand-alone at your domain name site, and/or through an online course aggregating service, such as Udemy.

Hybrid publishers such as LeanPub make it easy to convert a digital book into a course, so you can sell both.

Sell A Service

The availability of no-code and low-code approaches, along with AI-assistants, has made it more reasonable for an individual to offer some sort of software as a service, SaaS.

This is a recent and readable introduction to no-code and low-code. There are a large and steadily growing list of no-code environments, both open source and commercial.

Affiliate Revenue

It is not as easy as you might think to make substantial revenue from affiliate relationships, but it is possible. If you have, or are developing, a site that will get significant traffic, then affiliate links, appropriate to the topic, can help monetize the site.

Many of the companies in the domain industry, along with virtually all hosting services, offer affiliate arrangements. One nice aspect of affiliate links, over monetized ads delivered by Google Adsense or similar services, is that you can control exactly what businesses you want to promote.

Sell Digital Products

Another option is to sell other digital products from your site. Digital products could include content, apps, snippets, guides, art, sound clips, music and more.

This readable article Selling Products Online covers some of the main options, including mention of well known services such as Shopify and Weebly, as well as e-commerce solutions for your website. This can run the gamut from a few digital products that you handle directly to a full-fledged dropshipping operation.

Consulting

Do you have expertise that others seek and pay for? Then you might consider developing a site to support a consulting practice. Certainly all aspects of naming, branding, brand protection, domain acquisition, search engine optimization, marketing, etc. are suited to consulting.

If you do in-person or online speaking, you could also promote this through your site.

Sell Subscriptions

As a society we have become more used to purchasing subscriptions, from content or online music to video streaming services.

Do you have an idea for a subscription service? It could be a specialized newsletter, lists or leads, or something else.

Sell Services

From logo creation, web design, SEO optimization, to content writing, there are many types of services that you might offer to clients from your website.

Accept Donations

Maybe you don’t want to directly sell services or content, but you would be happy if those who use and value what you provide occasionally donate. You can use a service such as Buy Me A Coffee to incorporate donations on your site.

Getting Started

Here are some thoughts on getting started with monetizing one or more of your domain names.

1. Start Somewhere Look through your domain portfolio, and identify one domain name that, considering your expertise and interests, is a solid development possibility. For that one domain name, decide which type of monetization to carry out. If you have success with that, then expand to other types of monetization, and other domain names.
2. Acquire What You Know Even if you plan to sell, rather than develop or monetize in other ways, it makes sense to acquire domain names in sectors and niches that you know. That is particularly relevant if you plan to try to monetize some sites using one or more of the methods described in this article.
3. Do You Want To Do This? You need to be passionate about the niche for blogs, books, courses, etc. to be successful. Only consider development if you have a genuine interest, expertise, plus a unique perspective in the topic.
4. Do No Harm In most cases you probably ultimately hope to sell the domain name. It is possible that your development or other use of the name can increase the domain’s worth, but poorly executed development could harm the value of the domain name.
5. Have A Business Plan Most things in domain investing benefit from solid planning, and this is no exception. Outline in detail what you plan to do, set up a timeline, indicate steps and success indicators.
6. Check Laws and Regulations Either consult experts, or put the time into your own research, to make sure you are in compliance with laws and regulations.
7. Can You Do This Alone? It is true that more things can be accomplished by solo operators these days, but not everything. Ask yourself if you have all of the requisite skills to pull this off.
8. Keep Good Records Just as for your domain name acquisitions and sales, it is critical to keep good records. You will need this at tax time, but also reflections and progress markers to help you make smart decisions.
9. Know When To Give Up An exit strategy makes sense in most things, and this is no exception. Part of your planning should be an evaluation of whether this is working out, yielding enough benefit for the work and funds involved.

As I was completing this article, I discovered that @redemo had started, back in late 2021, a discussion on 22 Ways To Monetize Your Domain Name. It is a great list, and he covers several ideas not in this article. He has a more ambitious outlook than covered here, arguing for development of many, perhaps a majority, of domain names.

In the discussion that followed the @redemo post with 22 development ideas, @DN Playbook offered then following observation:

We should not be under the impression that monetizing domains is easy. All of the items listed require hard work to make them work.

Click to expand...

@DN Playbook also offers this advice:

Web standards have made deployment of websites much quicker. However, we are still at the mercy of Google. Social signals are also important. Content is still king. Those three elements (SEO, social, and content) are what take time and dedication.

Click to expand...

@redemo offers this sage advice:

Most important is providing an authentic solution to a problem which enough people have, to make it worth your while solving it. Everything else is marketing to as wide as your audience goes as possible with the least amount of time and money as possible.

Click to expand...

I also wanted to acknowledge Niche Site Lady, who posted on X on Sept 15, 2023 a nice list of ways to monetize a niche site. Her website is NicheSiteLady.com.

The section of NamePros concerned with Domain Parking and Traffic Monetization has a number of useful discussions.

I hope readers will add their own ideas and experiences with respect to this topic in the comment section below.