Labor Day Domain Madness!
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hey everyone,
Hope you had a great labor day weekend (for those of you in the States).
I spent the weekend working my tail off on my adsense empire. Why? Because godaddy decided to hold a little sale.
Friday morning I was sitting in Starbucks drinking my normal morning venti coffee and reading rss feeds on my ipad when I learned that godaddy was offering .49 cent domain registrations for .info domains (well $.67 really, .49 plus .18 icann fee).
They do this every once in a while but it’s been a few months since the last time they’ve done it…and I just missed the last sale. Since then I’ve MEANT to keep a list of domain names ready so that when they hold another sale I can just swoop in and make a bulk purchase…but that’s one of those things I never quite got around to.
So I had to scramble!! I had no idea how long the sale would last. The day? The weekend? An hour?
I rushed home…coffee forgotten…and started coming up with domain name ideas.
Side note: Before I go on I want to make a quick point about .info domain names. People hate them…they think that .com domain names are the only legitimate domain name out there. Of course, as with most things, people are stupid.
Let me tell you right away that for the purposes of creating adsense income generating sites, it doesn’t matter in the least what domain name extension you use. In fact, the .info domains that I already own are currently earning MORE than the 100 or so .com’s that I own on a per site basis. That just so happens to be a coincidence (these things fluctuate – next month the .coms may make a little more than the .info’s), but still.
Luckily, when everyone “Knows” something (in this case people KNOW that .info domains are no good) it creates market distortions that we can take advantage of to make huge piles of cash. In this case, that market distortion manifests in the form of massive .info discounts at godaddy! Isn’t Arbitrage fun?
Let’s compare…
100 .com’s at $9.99 = $999
100 .infos’ at .67 = $67
Do I need to explain any further? So, when godaddy offer’s .info’s for .67 cents…you buy as many as you can think of!!
…And that’s what I spent my whole labor day doing…dreaming up domain names and buying them.
Another benefit of .info’s (apart from the MASSIVE price difference) is that they aren’t saturated like .com’s are. Try finding a .com address that isn’t already taken…it can be a huge chore! On the other hand, .info’s are often overlooked and therefore it’s MUCH easier to find names that haven’t already been taken.
Of course, I have my own special way of picking domain names that I might share with you in the future…but still…
So how many domain names did I buy this weekend? 1,908
You read that right…I bought 1,908 domain names…and it cost me exactly $1,278.36 It might sound like a lot of money to plop down all at once, but that’s less than a third of what I earned last month with my 300 adsense and amazon sites.
If 300 sites made me $4,000 last month, let’s see what an additional 1,900 sites does!! And besides, I bought these new domain names with a credit card which means I won’t have to pay the bill for another month or so…by then some of those new sites will probably have earned me more than $1,300 – fingers crossed at least!
My plan for these new sites is not to build them all at once, but to crank out either 100 or 200 new sites a week till I go through all 1,900 new domains. Hopefully by then Godaddy will hold another sale and I’ll load up on another few thousand.
Why build out the sites gradually? Because these sites fluctuate wildly at Google. By spreading them out, I hope to even out those fluctuations and create a more steady income stream that’s less volatile and fluctuates less with mad google swings. That’s the theory at least…we’ll see!
The great thing about this is that I’m playing with house money! I bought these domains with money I earned last month from adsense. So even if they all flop, I’m not really out anything…but I don’t see them flopping.
Now I need to upgrade to a dedicated web server to handle the additional load. That’s my next step. It should increase my monthly web hosting fee from $50 to around $350 but it should be well worth it.
Never a dull moment!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
