One way to make some money from domains

This is something I've done a few times over the last couple of years with some success, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The process is simple:

1/ Find a niche in your locality that gets some reasonable search traffic and where there are some businesses with ineffective websites. You can use Google Keywords tool or a product called Market Samurai to help establish the search volume, and finding bad websites is never hard!

2/ Choose a neutral domain name that suggests what the site is about. www.lanzarotecarparts.com is good, www.mikescarparts.com isn't!

3/ Put a blog on the site, and focus on getting it ranking well for the relevant search terms.

4/ Put an Aweber sign up form on the site and start to create an email list within your own account.

5/ Post to the site just once a week.

6/ Put Adsense ads on it to earn a little towards the hosting, and maybe the occasional affiliate product.

7/ Sell the site and the email list.

If you do it right, within 6 to 12 months, you'll have built up a site with some Google page rank (2 is easy), anywhere from 100 to 500 subscribers and most importantly, it will rank number one for the key search terms you selected in the beginning, having overtaken your mediocre "competition."

You may have covered your hosting costs, or if you're lucky you could have turned a small profit. But you will have a site that has real value, and your investment has been a day or two at the beginning on set up, and then just one post a week.

So, having done the work, who can you sell the site to?

The Competition

This is the easiest place to start. Start by contacting the competitive sites and telling them you have the number one ranking site for their market and that you're interested in selling it. Their interest may be to develop the site, or simply put links onto it directing traffic to their own site. Either way, it should be of interest to them.

I've sold sites to competitors in this way for between $1100 and $3000 - not huge, but remember I've always put less than 50 hours work into these projects.

New Businesses

This is where you can really do well. If you spot someone new into the market, you have a chance to not only sell them the domain and email list, but you can also tender for the business to change the site to their required format with new logos and a new design.

In one case we were able to sell a site for almost $4000 and also bill a further $1300 for site design and social media set up.

A Blogger

If you can find a blogger who is passionate about and interested in the subject, you can sell the site to them! I've only done this once, and realized less than $900, but I had only been running that site for 3 months, so the return on the work done was reasonable. You can sell sites to other bloggers via Flippa.

I wouldn't ever consider this to be my core business, but it's a fun thing to keep on the side, and provides a welcome injection of cash every few months for very little work.

Anyone want to buy a scuba diving site? :)

I've started using Go Daddy for new domains - they just seem to offer the best prices and they currently have a sale running: Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!

Have you ever done something similar with domains?

Check these out:

1/ First forays into making money from your blog

2/ The perks of being a blogger

3/ Volkswagen and constant improvement for bloggers