IT.COM

How to Develop Domain Names for Profit

Spaceship Spaceship
Watch

redemo

Mug RuithTop Member
Impact
3,028
I have wanted to get this conversation started somewhere since last year. So rather than hoard all this information I'm just gonna throw caution to the wind and share what I know. Hope to see lots of people contribute with your own ideas and tips and questions.

Here's a 13-point very rough guide to domain name monetisation. Follow it all the way through you WILL make money [moderator edit: this is not guaranteed]. Also this is a new post today it's not copied and pasted from anywhere. After your domain name is profitable you can keep developing it to get more traffic and clicks or sell it and buy better domain names with more traffic opportunities. There are no right and wrong answers. No two setups are the same. It's trial and error. What works for you might not work for others and viced versa. You will make mistakes. It's inevitable. We're only human. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes and keep improving until you find your domain name monetisation system that works.

Contents
  1. Niche
  2. Keywords
  3. Domain name
  4. Hosting
  5. C.M.S.
  6. Theme
  7. Customisation
  8. Menu
  9. Publishing
  10. Indexing
  11. Traffic
  12. Ads
  13. Clicks
Step-By-Step Guide
1. Niche
Choose a profitable niche and something you are confident writing about. Ideally you have some personal experience in the subject and can share information that is not available anywhere else, or a unique angle on existing information. Random examples of profitable niches: Home beer making kits, buying cryptocurrency, collecting modern art, learn to speak a language, anti wrinkle treatments, vape kits, self publishing, domain name investing (y), website reseller hosting, family ancestory, D.N.A kits, credit card applications, life insurance, home energy swap, starting a business. Practically anything that people want and businesses are selling you can post about and get ad click revenue.​
2. Keywords
Research keyword volume using any of the free keyword volume tools. The keywords should be relevant to the niche you have chosen and the country and language that you are targeting. Try to choose transactional keywords. Why? Because users looking to buy things are more likely to click your ads. You can get many visitors for some keywords that are informational not transactional. Also with keywords you want to identify short tail and long tail. Why? Because later on your blog posts will be targeting long tail keywords and over time you will rank for the shorter keywords. Once you are more advanced it's a good idea to pay for your software and it will remove the limits. But if you are strapped for cash you can find many good free tools. Remember that these tools are most often providing search volume based on loose estimates from indexed keyword rankings. Take the data with a pinch of salt. It's variable. You won't know what's what until your website is ranked on search engines and getting traffic.​
3. Domain name
Register a good name that includes your keywords (it doesn't have to but it's easier). Try to use .com T.L.D. if you can but ultimately the content and structure of your website is more important that your domain name. After all a domain name is just an address. But an address that looks the part will attract more visitors on the same street than an address that doesn't look the part. One or two word names in .com or your local c.c.T.L.D. is the best solution. You can find an expired domain name or buy one. Just do your proper research on the name. You can also lease a domain name instead of buying it, or lease to buy. There's got to be someone on Namepros you can do a deal with.​
4. Hosting
Connect your domain name to a reliable hosting provider and activate your S.S.L. certificate. If you are developing many domain names it's a good idea to buy multi-site hosting. Check what's included in the hosting package carefully. Some web hosting companies give you hosting plus S.S.L. plus mailboxes all for one monthly fee. Other web hosting companies make you pay extra. Also check the customer reviews for the hosting company. If it has bad customer service reviews don't touch it with a barge pole.​
5. C.M.S.
You can use any most of the C.M.S. available including Wix, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger or if you have programming skills you can code it yourself. The two very important things from your customer's angle is speed and usability. Speed means that your website loads very fast on all devices. Usability is a broad term that includes customers being able to access your website from any device and perform all the required functions. If your website is slow and doesn't operate on smartphones then don't expect it to rank well in search engines.​
6. Theme
Activate your website's theme. Choosing a good theme is not the easiest of tasks. No theme is perfect. You should look for a theme that has good ratings and built by a professional company. If you are using Wordpress many themes have a free version to start you off and a pro version for around $ 50 if you want to unlock more features and get support from the creators. It's very much trial and error. Try not to spend too much time choosing a theme. Better to start posting and change your theme later.​
7. Customisation
Customising your theme shouldn't take more than one day but it's very important you cover the basics. You need a professional looking logo even if it's plain text. Most new customers will glance at your logo automatically just to remove a red flag. Look at the Namepros logo. It's simple, professional and tells you exactly what to expect on the site. Other customisations are the favicon which is becoming more and more important. Again look at the Namepros favicon for inspiration. nP. Very simple but recognisable and professional. You don't need to complicated it. There are too many other customisation to list now but you can find them in search engines or ask.​
8. Menu
Create your main menu with the main pages that will be on your site. Too few menu items looks weird and too many menu items looks cluttered. Go for 5, 6, 7 or 8 menu items. Again I'm taking the easy route and using Namepros as an example. There are 8 menu options which is perfect. Home, News, Buy Domains, Sell Domains, Requests, Appraisals, Blog, Chat. You can add or remove menu items depending on what you think your customer needs and doesn't need. There's no right and wrong. It's very much trial and error. Look on similar sites to see what menu items they have. All sites are different but the most important ones will be on most sites in your niche.​
9. Publishing
When your website is all set up you should publish one blog post every day. Start by creating a simple blog post template that you can find in search engines. You can either create and post a new blog entry every day but what some people do is create 30 blog entries all in one go and set them to publish daily for one month. Your life is so much easier this way but the choice its yours. Why post daily? Because one post a day will keep updating the publish dates on your X.M.L. site map which will in turn ping updates to all the search engine you want to rank in. Another update. Another update. Another update. This is what gets your website ranked in search engines. Then the search engine calculates which updates are good and which updates are sh-t. The good ones get shown to customers searching for relevant keywords. The sh-t updates are either ignored or put on search results pages that almost nobody visits like page 2, page 3, page 4. If your updates are on one of these pages it means they are sh-t compared to what's on page 1. In this scenario you want to compare your website against the page one websites and see how you can improve. Every time you change something and search engines re-index your website they give you a new score. You need to improve this score over time. I think that's how it works.​
10. Search Engines
If you set up your website properly if will have an account with Google Search Console where you can submit your X.M.L. sitemap. X.M.L. site page lists all the content you have allowed search engines to see. Most people only need to submit their website's X.M.L. site map once and it will automatically get crawled after that. Some people get impatient and manually submit their X.M.L. site map to Google for faster indexing in search results. You can do this if you want but it's optional. Generally with search engines just follow their rules and guidelines and you'll be fine. Most search engines have a help website you can search end find like a checklist of ways to improve your website for search engines.​
11. Traffic
If you've followed all the steps so far you start to see visitors come to your websites from search engines. Your tracking software will tell you what the most popular pages and blog posts are and many other things like what country your customers are in, what kind of device they are using and so many other things. Try not to get too distracted by all the data. Most importantly is you want to see your traffic steadily increasing, as well as the number of pages viewed per visit and length of time customers spend on your website. Remember we talked about good updates and sh-t update? Well if you improve your metrics its how to tell search engines that your website is sending good updates. You can also increase traffic through nowadays through many other methods but social media is one of the best. Look on search engines for how to do this. The main point about traffic is quality beats quantity every time. Thrill your customers with a great user experience and they will naturally want to engage engage. Or disappoint your customers with sh-t content and badly designed website and they will throw you the pooey end of the stick.​
12. Ads
You're all set up with a professional looking website which maybe took you a month to get bang on. Your website is indexed in search engines and getting lots of new and returning customers. This might have taken you another month. So you're 60 days into this dark cosmic void of wonder and now it's time to include some advertisements. Don't do it too early. Be patient and choose the right time. There's all the information you needs about ads in search engines. Key points are make sure the adverts you post are highly relevant to your customers. They will be much more likely to click and make a transaction. Don't just whack on a skyscraper banner and expect gold coins to start magically rolling down the hill and into your trouser pockets. It doesn't work like that. Really think about how you will integrate your ads to best serve your customers and bring you some bangers and mash.​
13. Clicks
If you've done everything right you will get ad clicks. It's the end step on a logical process that starts with research and ends with commission. You obviously want to make sure the money you spend on your domain name is less than the money you receive in ad click revenue. But some people also factor their time in to the equation. That's up to you but here's a simple calculation of year one expenses and profit. You paid $ 50 for your domain name. Then you paid $ 50 for hosting which included free S.S.L. All your software was free. Total expenses $ 100. A ton. $ 1 daily ad clicks for 10 months is $ 300. Your profit is $ 200 in year one less your liabilities for tax. Two tons. $ 1 daily ad revenue is kind of the bottom end. It should really get to $10 or $20 daily ad revenue which could land you with $ 1000 or $ 2000 or more (or less). If you get confident buy better domain names which probably cost you more. Start paying for automation software that save your time. Successful people with good domain names that are properly setup and monetised can earn upwards of $ 50000 per year.​
Thanks to Namepros and everyone who contributes on the forum for being awesome.​
 
Last edited by a moderator:
77
•••
The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Hi

Totally agree!
it's a suckers trap
without empirical proof, it's just hype and propaganda

imo....

"Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence. If I tell you not to put your hand into the toaster do you need to see a video of someone putting their hand into a toaster?
 
Last edited:
0
•••
@redemo Can you give us a couple of examples of websites you've built?

I can't do that for the simple reason there are one million members here and the chances of someone cloning my hard word is ridiculously high. In the second part I'll share examples from similar products. You can then decide based on the tools available if it's all smoke and mirrors. It's hard to fake traffic and rankings.
 
0
•••
I'm not selling anything. Mods have already said I cannot post affiliate links. If you disagree with something technical in the thread that's cool. Let's debate. But generally disagreeing with the idea of sharing knowledge for communal benefit is such a shame and also disingenuous. Have you actually read the entire post before poo pooing it?
 
1
•••
Last edited:
1
•••
List of some Wordpress plugins I use. Requested by @MasterOfMyDomains. Different sites use different plugins depending on what's needed. Generally I try to use the fewest plugins as possible.
  1. LiveChat
  2. Hubspot
  3. Search WP
  4. Smush
  5. All in one SEO
  6. Google Site Kit
  7. Bing Webmaster URL Submission
  8. Microsoft Clarity
  9. Woo Zone
  10. W3 Super Cache
  11. Autoptimize
  12. Akismet Anti-Spam
  13. Max Mega Menu
  14. Yoast
  15. WP Forms
  16. OptinMonster
  17. Broken Link Checker
 
Last edited:
4
•••
0
•••
Thanks to some trolls on my domain name monetisation threads this will be my last public post on Namepros until 1 September. I really lot my sh*t with some of them today. It's ok to have an opinion but the constant B.S. is depriving people who actually need the money of learning how to earn revenue from ads on developed websites. Then you don't need to keep registering or buying garbage names and dropping when they don't sell. People keep saying I'm offering a service which is 100% bullsh*t and made up. Here to share and learn through that endeavour. You can send me private messages with questions about monetising domain names. Not in any way an expert -- or offering a service -- but will try to help. Payment accepted in bitcoin (joke). :xf.rolleyes:
 
3
•••
Can you give us a couple of examples of websites you've built?

I can't do that for the simple reason there are one million members here and the chances of someone cloning my hard word is ridiculously high.

214035_ad45682c3b09cb9f336171501717b2ea.jpg

 

Attachments

  • Untitled drawing.jpg
    Untitled drawing.jpg
    28.1 KB · Views: 149
3
•••

Can you give us a couple of examples of websites you've built?

I can't do that for the simple reason there are one million members here and the chances of someone cloning my hard word is ridiculously high.
214035_ad45682c3b09cb9f336171501717b2ea.jpg


Hi

ding!, ding!, ding!, ding!

Congrats, you are truly a good reader

one who can see that the "right question" was asked,
while, the wrong answer was given.

imo...
 
3
•••
Temporarily breaking self-imposed curfew to share two messages sent to @biggie who didn't respond so it's not personal information being shared. Normally I wouldn't post anything sent in a private message, but both posts are mine. -- replaces you know what. Nothing personal against @biggie but this continuous unfounded trolling is spoiling the thread for others. I repeat -- am not promoting any service. If @Bravo Mod Team ban me for being abusive so be it. I respect both the Namepros rules and freedom of speech and nothing personal against anyone but I feel as though certain members are just trolling now.

I don't know why you are trolling my help threads? All you've succeeded in doing is distract and deprive other people on the forum from gaining the knowledge -- I spent so many hours learning and failing and trying repeatedly every night -- of how to monetise domain names. You have an opinion and it's freedom of speech which is fair enough especially as a long time and respected Namepros member. But you're 100 % wrong in thinking I'm trying to sell a service (where have I said it once? an inference? anything?) or who the f--k is Adam Dicker? I challenge you to debate the technical aspects of what I've shared but you probably won't and that's a shame for everyone else. Anyway I can't be f--ked with this s--t anymore so you're on ignore mate go ahead and say what you want. Share this message too if you want. Report me for swearing. I don't give a s--t.

@redemo, Jul 31, 2021

Hi. I read this message again and I'm sorry for losing my temper and being rude to you. A lot of work went into my threads and a lot of failures endured before I got any success with ads. The intention was never to offer a service. You are entitled to disagree. Can't take back what's been said. Should have just ignored it rather than getting upset. Cheers.

@redemo, Yesterday at 11:46 AM
 
Last edited:
0
•••
Temporarily breaking self-imposed curfew -- part 2 -- to share general outcome of communication with @biggie. Since he has fully explained his position I don't think he is trolling the thread so I am retracting that accusation now. It's fair that if I or someone make precise claims about ad click + purchase income they should provide screenshot of proof or anyone can say anything. Where I disagree with him is sharing the technical aspects of the system I use to monetise domain names ---- he's saying I need to provide a proof or I shouldn't share ---- I'm saying it's too easy to copy my site and take all my traffic so I can't provide proof as well as clearly breaking my T.OS. with the ad agency. We disagreed on this. I respect his opinion and grateful he took time to reply in full but I will continue to share the technical steps needed to develop and monetise domain names ---- but without making such claims of personal income. Next time @biggie or anyone else questions it I will try to respond more professionally or ignore it.
 
Last edited:
4
•••
Final update before September. I'm working on a detailed plan of all the technical steps required of how to register a domain name and develop into a profitable website. It's a mammoth task and will take some time. Post here or message any requests. Plan to post it here on Namepros as a creative commons type article. Cheers.
 
4
•••
I haven't had time to write this yet so it's on the shelf but not forgotten. Stay tuned.
 
0
•••
It's been nearly six months since I posted this. Has anyone developed a website in that time?
 
0
•••
Hi

ding!, ding!, ding!, ding!

Congrats, you are truly a good reader

one who can see that the "right question" was asked,
while, the wrong answer was given.

imo...
ding! ding! ding! ding! indeed. Dollar! Dollar! Dollar! Dollar!
 
0
•••
Bumpy road here red. I have tried to start development threads but its not to popular. Lets build, i am going to clone a site today, or duplicate it.
You do team viewer? Skype.
As you can see by comments above your wasting time posting here.
Pm me if you want to develop. Or reply to last message re: wagon wheels
 
1
•••
Bumpy road here red. I have tried to start development threads but its not to popular. Lets build, i am going to clone a site today, or duplicate it.
You do team viewer? Skype.
As you can see by comments above your wasting time posting here.
Pm me if you want to develop. Or reply to last message re: wagon wheels
I have peacefully accepted this reality. It was just not meant to be. Maybe it's time to drift away forever into the annals of human history......
 
0
•••
I have peacefully accepted this reality. It was just not meant to be. Maybe it's time to drift away forever into the annals of human history......
You’re full of bull shite. Today you asked if anyone has built a website, I asked what you have built and you reported my post

Now you’re posting direct messages to justify your bull shite.

All you are is talk.
 
1
•••
It's been nearly six months since I posted this. Has anyone developed a website in that time?
What have you done?
 
0
•••
Seriously. If you're going to present yourself as an expert, you should at least be able to provide an example.

It's not hard. You don't have to post the url, you could post a couple of screenshots and give examples of some of the mistakes, problems you encountered.
 
Last edited:
1
•••
Last edited:
0
•••
you should at least be able to provide an example.

It's not hard. You don't have to post the url, you could post a couple of screenshots and give examples of some of the mistakes, problems you encountered.
Namaste my friend. Namaste.
 
Last edited:
0
•••
3
•••
Peace and love to all who here dwelleth. Aside from that if I get one more private message with a Microsoft Word document attachment of questions for me to read, vague request for help, or gibberish bot talk then I'm turning off private messages. If you want help by private messages then BE SPECIFIC and post it in the flipping thread in plain text without attachments or endless garden paths and such like. I'm here to help but not on this planet for much longer so don't waste my f@cking time with nonsense. Aside from that unfortunate yet necessary aside, I want to take this treasured moment to bless everyone and send namaste and give you holy namaskar for our communal namaskaram. Cheers.
 
0
•••
Peace and love to all who here dwelleth. Aside from that if I get one more private message with a Microsoft Word document attachment of questions for me to read, vague request for help, or gibberish bot talk then I'm turning off private messages. If you want help by private messages then BE SPECIFIC and post it in the flipping thread in plain text without attachments or endless garden paths and such like. I'm here to help but not on this planet for much longer so don't waste my f@cking time with nonsense. Aside from that unfortunate yet necessary aside, I want to take this treasured moment to bless everyone and send namaste and give you holy namaskar for our communal namaskaram. Cheers.
hey bro i'm so sorry for the way you were insulted because you wanted to help us by sharing what you know... please accept my plea on behalf of them. its unfortunate that some led their life in hindering public progress...

Namaste
 
2
•••
Back