Is it possible to earn passive income for domains? Absolutely! It isn’t rocket science but it does involve a little bit of work. Here are the simple steps:
1. Buy a cheap domain name.
2. Decide how you’re going to monetize it. Either through ads on a niche site, affiliate sales, or domain parking.
3. Get up and actually do the work.
Buying Cheap Domains
GoDaddy currently has a great promotion on .info domains. They’re currently selling for only $0.99 instead of the usual $9 dollars. That’s about 90% off the regular price, and I spent the past several days getting about 15 domains that I think I might be able to monetize in some form or the other.
People might feel more comfortable or might more easily remember .com domains, but if you’re targeting search engine traffic it probably shouldn’t matter very much. A lot of the domains have dashes in them (example Sterling-Silver-Rings.info, but again, for visitors coming from a search engine it shouldn’t matter too much.
I also got a few domains that I think are pretty cool like Discount Ipod.info, Discount Seiko Watches.info and Cheap iPod Batteries.info.A good domain name has highly relevant keywords in it. How do you find these relevant keywords? Try using a search tool like Keyword Elite. It’ll save you a ton of time in research.
The most common way of profiting from a niche site, is creating a lot of content around a keyword or an idea and putting ads around it. If you can create a lot of unique content around a topic and attract a lot of visitors, you should be able to easily monetize it through Google Adsense or Text-Link-Ads or LinkWorth.
One way I’m thinking of profiting from them is through building a niche store (BANS). I already have an account with Dreamhost and I can host unlimited domains with them without any extra cost. You either set up an Amazon store or an Ebay store and make referral income off the sales. That’s a great way to produce residual income if you can make it work.
If you’re facing problems installing the BANS software on Dreamhost, check out this guide: How To install BANS on Dreamhost.
These are both great ways to produce residual passive income from a few hours of work. It might take a few months ramp up, but they should both add to my passive income.
If you’d like to buy a revenue generating website check out my business and investment store.
Update: September 18th 2008
Looks like my ebay-affiliate stores should pull in over $500 this month! The income has been going up every single month, while the effort has almost dropped off! That’s a pretty nice residual income stream.
However, if you’re too lazy to create content, then you might want to consider domain parking.
Affiliate Sales
This is by far the most profitable strategy and also the most work! You figure out how to drive traffic to a site and how to get people to part with their money either by buying a 3rd-party product or something you’ve developed yourself. I know guys who make over $100,000 a year doing this. It isn’t exactly passive but the hourly rate is insanely high if you know what you’re doing. I know of one guy who makes the equivalent ofi $5,000 an hour from his affiliate sites.
Here’s an example of an affiliate site that sells a very interesting product. Its a system that teaches to make money selling stuff! Here’s an example of a site that sells a product they developed themsleves.
Domain Parking
Another way I’m thinking of monetizing them is through Domain Parking. Many companies offer domain parking, including Sedo, GoDaddy and even Google. However, what they usually do is just put up ad links on your site. Unless people are directly typing in the address of your site into the browser you are unlikely to see any traffic or revenue.
A better way is to use a company like Why Park? They will automatically generate content for your sites and update it on a regular basis. The resulting site with fresh content is much more likely to get indexed in the search engines and get organic traffic (that’s traffic from search engines) and thus you are more likely to actually see some revenue.