Make Money Online by Buying and Selling Domain Names

There are many ways you can make money online, one way which you may not have considered, but where big money is possible, is by buying and selling domain names.

The idea is simple, you buy a domain name e.g. ZitBusters.com, you list it for sale, at the industry auction sites such as Sedo or Afternic (or possibly even eBay) someone offers you a vast amount of money for it and you sell it. Well, that’s the idea, the reality is somewhat more prosaic.

To sell the domain names you buy, you will probably need to actively market them i.e. find the e-mail addresses of people that you think may be interested in your name and fire off an e-mail. If you’re lucky or the name you have is an obviously excellent name then you will get an answer saying something along the lines of “How much do you want for your name?”, which is when negotiations begin.

So what is an ‘excellent domain name’. Generally, they are dot coms (dot coms are worth around ten times as much as dot nets) and they are generic e.g. shoes.com, beer.com, business.com.

How much are generic dot coms worth? Well, the highest sale so far in 2008 is Fund.com which sold for the tidy sum of $9.9 million, Invest.com came in at number 5 and sold for $1.015 million, NewlyWeds.com on the other hand was number 53 and sold for $130,000. Sales are reported every week over at DNJournal.com where you can also see a list of the highest selling names of the year.

You may have seen the iReport channel on CNN. Where did they get the name iReport from? They bought it from self-styled ‘Domain King’ Rick Schwartz for $750,000. Rick Schwartz is one of the most successful and well-known of the domainers in the domain name industry. Other big names to look for are Kevin Ham, who has a portfolio of domain names worth around $300 million, Frank Schilling, Sahar, Rick Latona, Yun Ye who sold his portfolio of domain names for $164 million and many more. All these guys have interesting tales of how they got to be where they are by simply buying domain names, hanging on to them for a while then selling them on for a profit.

So what sort of names should you buy? As mentioned above, generic names are the best but of course most of the dot coms are already gone. So if you want a good generic name you may have to buy it off the person who already owns it. Alternatively you can wade through long lists of names that are dropping (i.e. not being renewed) at places like TDNam and Snapnames. Or of course you can try and discover a gem that no-one else has registered (very difficult as all dictionary word dot coms were registered long ago).

A word of warning, some registrars are unscrupulous and if they see you have looked for a name but not registered it, they will then ‘reserve’ it for you, by which they really mean block it and sell it to you for an inflated price. Do a search on network solution front running. Godaddy are the biggest for registering domains and they seem to be OK, but if you do find a good name that isn’t registered you would be well-advised to register it quickly as there are very few secrets on the Internet. The price for registering a dot com is around $10, but do a search for ‘discount codes’ and you will probably find coupons that will give you a 20% discount. If you use the code 199TEST with Godaddy you should be able to register a domain name for 99 cents, but it only works once. Bear in mind also that there is a 5 day ‘grace period’ and if you change your mind registrars will often cancel your domain name and refund the fee if you ask nicely.

More words of warning, steer clear of trademarked names i.e. stuff like Google, Microsoft, Armani etc... you will only cause yourself a lot of trouble.

While waiting for your names to sell you can either develop the name into a blog or a site or you can ‘park’ them . Parking them is a simple way of creating a page with some ads. on which may or may not bring in some money while you wait to sell your domain. You need to sign up with a ‘parking’ company. The easiest one to sign up with is Namedrive. In an interesting development Google has decided to set up its own parking service. This after previously criticizing parking companies as offering no value and being of no use etc.... Now that Google has set up its own parked pages it appears that parking domain names is cool. Go figure. (From what I hear though, most domainers are not recommending Google’s parked service due to the many complications involved.)

For more information about the whole domain name business you can visit forums like NamePros. To see what sort of prices domain names have been selling for check out DNSalePrice.

This is only an introduction to domain name trading but it gives the basic ideas. There are people who have made millions from domains, and in my opinion successful domainers make lots of money but it does take a lot of work, particularly if you are just starting out.

How to Make Money Online for Beginners

This past year I have been fortunate to rank a number of blogs on top of Google's search listings and the result has been a steady stream of income from Google Adsense, selling Advertising space and Lead Generation. This is passive income that is generated daily regardless of how much I post and is not dependent on social media or social marketing. My interest online is to make money with the least amount of effort required. My methods are widely used by Internet Marketers and almost completely unknown to Bloggers. In fact, the prevalence of social blogging has obfuscated what was once widely known - that search traffic is steady, it converts into sales or clicks and it can be grown almost exponentially by simply targeting more and more keywords.

The advent of social marketing has produced bloggers by the millions, each one chasing a dream of large readerships in hopes of generating buckets of income. Each one almost completely ignorant of search traffic or the benefits of high placement in the serp's. The irony is that social traffic is much harder to get on a consistent basis, consists mostly of other bloggers, doesn't convert into buyers and requires a huge time commitment. Worst of all it generates no income until you are able to achieve "authority" status in your niche and are pulling in thousands of visitors a day. Even then your revenue consists almost entirely of advertising fees generated by selling space to other bloggers trying to monetize your traffic. They find out soon enough that your traffic doesn't convert either - how many of you buy or click on the ads pasted on the A-List sites? The A-List is fortunate that there is no shortage of new advertisers willing to fork over large sums in order to replace former advertisers who learned that social traffic doesn't convert. In most cases the A-List is paid to promote sign-up programs - more social media networks for the most part. An endless circle...

The fact that there can only be a limited number of A-List sites or authorities in any one niche is lost to the masses who believe they have what it takes to reach the top. Everyone, it seems, believes they have the right stuff. I have seen a lot of bloggers rise quickly - develop a decent readership, some good PR and just as quickly lose interest in their blog in spite of thousands of RSS subscribers. Why? They don't make enough money to cover the time commitment required to keep the blog fresh in the readers mind.

The alternative to social blogging is of course SEO or Search Engine Optimization. In truth this can and should be applied even if you choose to chase social traffic. I don't chase social traffic at all but because of my high serp rankings I find that social bloggers find me anyway. I mention this simply to point out that those of you hoping to gain fame and recognition for your work can achieve it by dominating the top rankings in the serp's and save yourself the countless hours of work needed to make a name for yourself in the social arenas.

As 2008 draws to a close I have given a lot of thought to how Google will tweak its algorithm over the coming year. Without getting long winded it doesn't take a lot of imagination to assess Google's predicament; the search engine has to have a means by which to rank sites based on keyword relevancy - the easy part and it has to have a means for deciding which relevant site should rank at the top of the serp's - the hard part.

How would you do it?

Would you rank sites based on their RSS subscribers?

Would you rank sites based on their Page Rank?

Would you rank sites based on their social links and traffic?

Would you rank sites based on their Alexa Rank? Their Compete rank?

Would you rank sites based on the fame of the site?

If you would entertain any of these ideas then your ranking system would lead to a useless search engine. All these methods are easily gamed or have no relevancy for the vast majority of niches. How would sites related to "Oil Filters" be ranked if Google used RSS subscribers as a basis for ranking?

Google's predicament is that it has to have a system that works for all keywords and not just those that apply to social niches. Many a social A-Lister has preached that Google will use social media in its rankings - a belief that I find laughable. Google has been eliminating metrics that can be easily gamed - not adding them to the mix.

Ultimately the only system that works well but is not perfectly fair is to rank sites based on incoming links. Yes this can be gamed as well but for the vast majority of niches this is still the best measure of a site's authority.

Rather than find a new system Google has methodically tweaked its system to degrade or dismiss links of poor quality and give greater weight to links that are deemed high quality.

Almost all social links - Do-follow comments, Bookmarks, Digg, Stumbleupon etc are considered low quality and while they may be registered by G they will not gain you top ranking in a competitive niche. They will work fine in an un-competitive niche but even then a single link from a quality source will outrank all your low quality links.

Google's algorithm will reward you well if you follow my recommendations outlined below.

4 Steps to Google Dominance

Keyword Research

Forget Quality Content (No such thing to a machine) - use Relevant Content.

On Page Keyword Optimization

Develop 1 way Inbound Links to your site.


Target the most popular keywords in your niche, add relevant content, use your main keyword in your URL, Blog Title, Page and Post titles and then spend the rest of your time developing quality inbound links.

I have said this many times - quality inbound links are the single most important aspect for ranking well in Google.

The 5 Measurements of Inbound Links

The Quantity of inbound links.

- This is least important but effective for low competition keywords.

The Title keywords on the page linking to you.

The Anchor Text used in the link pointing to you.

- You will only rank for the terms others use in their links pointing at your site. This is crucial for gaining top ranking.

The Relevance of the content on the page linking to you.

- The site with the most keyword anchored links coming from relevant content posts/pages will outrank all others.

The Quality of the inbound link.

- The best link you can possibly get is a PR10 link using your main keyword in the anchor coming from within a post relevant to your keyword. The further from this optimum the less quality the link. A few of these quality links will easily have you outranking sites with 1000's of lesser quality links.

I have not talked about Domain Age or the popular SEO blathering regarding keyword density, blog platforms, site design, posting frequency or any of the other "tips" spouted at length by all the so-called experts online. The reason is simple - it is all window dressing in the greater scheme of things and ultimately unimportant when it comes to serp domination.

The simple truth is that I can rank any site on top of the serp's with the right backlinks and provided the site has legit content (but only because it may get a human review - I could do it with spam if I only had to dupe the machine). How much content or how well it is written is insignificant for ranking purposes.

If you just have to chase social media then do yourself a favor - as you get yourself known ask your friends and readers to use your keywords when they link to you. Do you know how many times I have heard a social blogger tell me that social media is great because it gets them PR and backlinks. When I check they have hundreds of links using their name in the anchor. Yup - they rank really well for a term no one searches for. What a waste and yet the links could be so beneficial. As for PR - just remember this - your own PR has no bearing on your ranking. It's the PR of the sites linking to you that effects your ranking and only if they use your keywords.

Making Money Online is not complicated. Rank on top of the serp's for as many keywords as you can. Add Adsense. Collect money. Rinse and repeat.

It really does work and I hope many of you will achieve the same success as I have over the coming year.

Making money from your web site.

Making money with your web site can be easy and challenging at the same time. Easy because all you need to do is to place snippet of code in-to your web site’s html code. Challenging because if there is no traffic to your web-site, no matter how many ads you have on it, your will earn zero.

I you have decent amount of traffic to your website and are ready to offer some space to the advertisers there many options available to you. But before you begin, please don’t over do it. Have you ever come across a site that has nothing but ads in it? How long did you stay there? This is exactly how visitors to your website will behave if they see your website as being overstaffed with advertisements of all sorts. Buy providing quality content that is relevant to your visitor, you have a better chance to keep the visitor, to make him come back and along the way to make money with advertisements on your site. Making sure that advertisements on your site are relevant as well will allow you to profit more.

So how do you make money with your website?

There are many options available today to publishers. Some are better than others but neither should be dismissed or overlooked, since each program out there can offer something unique.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense- probably most famous, most sophisticated and most used method of monetizing on your website.

How does Google Adsense work?

Google Adesnse works in conjunction with Google Adwords. Google Adsense is a way of delivering advertisers ads to the end user (Internet user). When an advertiser using Google Adwords choses to have his advertisements delivered via content match, his ads will appear on the sites that are approved by Google Adsense. So whenever you apply and are approved for Adsense your website(s) become a part of Google Network. Google uses sophisticated technology to analyze the content of your website and place advertisements that are highly relevant to the content of your website. So if you have quality content on your website and good traffic, you maybe able to monetize quiet well with Adsense.

What are the alternatives to Google Adsense, how do they differ?

AdBrite and TexLinkAds

While Google is a leader in advertising today there some good alternatives which can be used to make money with your website. We will discuss AdBrite and TexLinkAds among so many other options hoping that you are not bored of your mind and still reading this article.

When using AdBrite or TextLinkAds, the advertisements on your site will be placed in a form so static html links and if your site ranks high in the search engines, you may be able to make $100 or more a week per link. Unfortunately neither Adbrite or TextLinkAds are as much sophisticated as Google when it comes to analyzing the content of your website, so that ads appearing on your site will be relevant to your visitors. But with AdBrite as well as TexLinkAds, you have an option to approve or disapprove an advertiser and therefore to control the relevancy of your ads from these systems to the content of your website.

Many web masters and advertisers will use AdBrite and TexLinkAds to increase “link popularity” for their websites. You too can use these systems for link building purposes as well. But if you have good traffic to your site and your site is ranked high in the search engines, you may make as much money with AdBrite and TextLinkAds as you would with Google Adsense.

Tips On Making Money With AdBrite

So you have joined AdBrite? You may be one of those lucky web-masters or bloggers that will immediately start benefiting from the advertising ads shown on your blog or website. Chances are that you may also be one of many who, after joining AdBrite and placing the necessary codes on your website, will earn pennies per day as weeks and months pass them by. Every forum or website you go to, to find an advise on how to monetize on your website via advertisements, you will read that in order to begin earning any good money with advertisements on your website, you will need traffic and lots of it.

There are few things that you can do to improve your chances on earning better income from AdBrite, even if your website does not have much traffic. Basic understanding on how AdBrite works will help you to set a stage for success with advertising.

Placing Your Website in Correct Category and Choosing the Right Keywords.

Whenever you create a new AdBrite add zone for your website, you are asked to choose a category to which your website belongs. While this may seam as a simple step, placing your website in a wrong category will affect the kind of adds that will be shown on your website. If your website, for example is about cosmetics and you have chosen for your website a category for websites about pets, the future visitors may wonder why the advertisements for animal products are shown on your website.

You may also consider to use wisely the description field for your website. Many web masters use the description that is exact copy of the description they have used when submitting their websites to other directories and search engines. While this kind of description is OK, you will be better off to you use that option to sell your space. You can, for example mention that all AdBrite advertisements are located above the “fold” on your website. Many advertisers know that adds located above the fold have much better click-through.

After choosing the category, you will be asked to provide two sets of keywords. One- to describe the content and nature of your website. The other- to let advertisers know what they can sell via advertisements on your website. Make sure that each group of keywords are related. This will only compliment the content of your website and most likely improve the click-through of your ads.

The above steps of course are not important should you choose to manually approve each and every add. But if you let AdBrite to approve the adds, they will most likely reflect the keywords you have provided in one of the steps while setting an add zone.

Pricing Your Add Zone.

One of the great features available to AdBrite publishers is that they can choose to set their own prices that will be used in direct purchases. Setting the right price is very important. While you may have an ambition of showing an advertising at $100 per day, this will only work for high trafficked websites. On the other hand setting lower then your competitors may result in poor earnings. With time you will be able to adjust prices after you learn what works and what does not. Having the freedom to set your own prices, you may also use it as an incentive feature. Let say you have set the price at $1 per day. You can offer a discount to those advertisers who will choose to place a weekly rate at $5 or a monthly rate at $20.

Developing Relationships With AdBrite Advertisers.

Since you will be able to manually approve all direct purchases, use this opportunity to build a business relationship with your advertisers. Do not be afraid to ask for their feedback even if they do not repurchase the adds on your website in the future. This feedback will provide you with tips on how to improve your efforts.

Upon approval of specific adds for your website send an e-mail to your advertisers reminding them to install tracking code on their website. If they have done so, send them another e-mail to see whether or not their campaign is performing well.

How To Make Money With Google Adsense

| By XD-2008 |

Learning how to make money with Google Adsense is probably the easiest way to make money online.

In this article, I will show you what it takes to make money with Google Adsense and more importantly, how I got started making money with Google Adsense.

Get ready for some interesting screenshots……

How Much Money Can You Make With Google Adsense?

The sky is the limit, frankly.

But one thing about Google Adsense is that you are not likely to earn a lot of money right from the beginning.

Seriously ask yourself this question:

Would you like to be paid $4k a month? Or being paid $0 in the first month but getting a pay rise of $100 every month thereafter?

If your answer is the former, Google Adsense may not be for you.

But if your answer is the latter, that’s the kind of money Google Adsense can give you - at the minimum!

What It Takes To Make Money With Google Adsense

I’ll keep my answer short. You need to:

Step 1) Conduct keyword research
Step 2) Churn out good articles based on the right keywords
Step 3) Build SEO friendly websites
Step 4) Build links (to boost your search engine rankings)

If you are new to internet marketing, every one of these 4 steps can be a challenge to you. But trust me, each of these 4 steps are simple skills that you can learn and master. Once you’ve mastered these 4 steps, you simply have to repeat the 4 steps again and again.

How I Started Making Money With Google Adsense

To tell you the truth, I had been making pennies from Google Adsense since 2004. But I started making ’significant’ income from Google Adsense after I made a major decision in September 2006.

The major decision was to subscribe to PLRPRO, a premium membership site that gives you 440 unique articles a month in 11 different niches.

One thing I like about PLRPRO is that the founder has done all the keyword research. That saves my work in doing Step 1.

Churning out good articles in Step 2 is also easy, since I already have 440 articles to choose from.

Back in 2006, the only things I needed to focus on was Step 3 and 4. (Today, PLRPRO has grown so much that even Step 3 and Step 4 are semi-automated. With the latest PLRPRO that is launched today, the whole process has been simplified tremendously.)

Before you jump into building your Adsense empire, let me give you a preview of what you can expect.

As I mentioned, I subscribed to PLRPRO in September 2006. In that month, I only built two websites out of the 11 niches given to me. Apparently I wasn’t one of the hardworking members in PLRPRO.

Here’s my Adsense earning from the two websites in October 2006 - $17.57. Nothing impressive. (I purposely blur part of the website url so that you can look at the change in income for each website.)

In November 2006, I made $64.45 with Google Adsense from just two websites. No new website was added in that month.

In December 2006, I added 3 more websites. My monthly Adsense earning was $76.23.

The 3 new websites got established fast and in January 2007, I achieved my first three figure a month Adsense income. In January, I also added 2 new websites.

Things were starting to look promising, weren’t they?

In February 2007, my total websites increased to 9 and my Adsense income for that month was $349.19.

It’s worth noting that out of the 9 websites, 2 of them made me more than $100 a month!

Sidetrack: Take a look at my February stats again and look at my new website that start with www.rom….. I’m very fortunate to have built a website on this niche.

Why?

Because…… Look at what this website is making me now!

$626.54 a month from Google Adsense from just one website! I may be lucky on this niche. So far, it’s my best performing Adsense site.

Ok, let’s go back to my progress……

After 1 year, in September 2007, my Adsense income was $1099.62.

After 2 years, in September 2008, I made $2725.28 from Google Adsense.

Can you see how the income grow exponentially?

All the earnings I’ve shown above are from websites built using articles from PLRPRO, excluding my Adsense income from other sources. This gives you a better assessment of the potential of PLRPRO.

Final Remarks

In my opinion, Adsense is the easiest way to make money online. As long as you are willing to work, you will surely make money. There is no need to know how to write good sales letters or presell affiliate products.

Moreover, in the process of making money from Google Adsense, you will master the skill of generating traffic from the Search Engines. With this skill, you can easily diversify into other ways of making money online, such as affiliate marketing.

Special Bonus For Action Takers

The new PLRPRO has just been released today and it’s now more than just a content provider. It has transformed into something that is close to a push-button solution to making money from Google Adsense.

It’s excellent for newbies.

If you sign up PLRPRO through my link, I’m going to give you an invaluable bonus.

After two years of creating Adsense websites, I realize that certain niches are more profitable than other niches. Interestingly, whenever I create another website in the profitable niche, the website will be another winner.

As a special bonus for those who take action, I’m giving you a list of my top performing niches and poor performing niches. This will help you to focus on the profitable niches and avoid niches that are not profitable.

Yes, with this bonus, you will know what is the above niche that makes me more than $600 a month.

Here’s what you need to do to get the bonus:

1. Sign up PLRPRO through this link.
2. Email the receipt to support[at]leadsleap.com, with the subject “My PLRPRO Bonus”.

I’ll send you the bonus personally.

PLRPRO is a limited membership program. The last time I checked, Group A and Group B are already sold out. As far as I know, there are a total of 5 Groups and each group probably have about 30 vacancies left. This means there are less than 100 vacancies left at the time I checked.

How to make money from your blog: 3 tips

Many of the people who write blogs today simply want to share their opinion on something. But then there are the business-minded folks, who have found a way to use blogs, or Web logs, to bring in a little extra cash too.

I recently wrote a column detailing how to get a blog up and running to boost your small business.

If you're interested in taking it further — blogging for bucks, if you will — here are five strategies that could turn your blog into a moneymaker.

1. Sell advertising.

This is likely the most common means of leveraging a blog to generate income. If yours happens to become a well-known blog, or one that is well-received in a particular niche, it's always possible to sell ad space on your

own. For lesser-known blogs, services such as Google's AdSense or BlogAds enable bloggers to establish ad programs.AdSense's — which lets you select several ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it's free. BlogAds, on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a commission in return for any ad placements that result. "The nice thing, too, is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive," says Scott Allen, co-author of "The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online."

2. Help sell others' products.

Here is another click-through opportunity. Affiliate programs enable your blog to serve as a conduit between readers and onlinesites offering various goods and services. One popular choice is Amazon.com. If, for instance, you offer book reviews or even just mention a book in passing in your blog, an affiliate program provides a means for your readers to click directly from your blog to Amazon to obtain further information about the book. If they break out the checkbook or charge card, you get paid as well.

3. Solicit contributions.

Not every blog-related income opportunity involves hawking goods or services. As Blanche DuBois did in "A Streetcar Named Desire," consider relying on the kindness of strangers. Ask for contributions. If, for instance, your small-business blog supports a cause or issue in some fashion — say you repeatedly mention tax reform, health care or some other topic — you can always ask for reader support.Even if you've attracted a group of regular followers who simply enjoy reading what you have to say, they may be willing to underwrite their loyalty with a little financial help. Programs such as PayPal make iteasy to establish a simple on-site contribution collection button. "There are lots of worthy 'cause' blogs that would qualify for donations from grateful members of the blog community," says Las Vegas communications consultant Ned Barnett