If you want to play the domaining game and turn your domains into dollars, you must have a plan.
There's no point in going out and buying every single available domain you can think of, there are several core principles you need to take into consideration before you spend any money.
Although I can't go into all the details within the scope of this article, I will introduce you to three basic concepts that will give you a good overview of the domaining market.
Here we go...
Domain Parking Domain parking is one of the laziest ways to get started in domaining.
All you need to do is find some domain names, park them with a service like Namedrive and let them sit there.
If you picked your names well, the pages will soon attract some search engine traffic and generate some income from advertizing.
You can of course speed up the process by doing some off-page optimization, such as writing articles or blogging.
Type-In Traffic Type-in traffic is traffic that comes from people entering generic words into their browser's address bar.
If, say, someone is looking for dress shoes, he might just enter "dress shoes" into the address bar and hit enter.
And, what do you know, he lands on http://www.
dressshoes.
com.
Now this site may not be selling anything, but it will most definitely have ads related to shoes on it.
And someone looking for dress shoes is highly likely to click on one of them which will make the owner of the domain some money.
The key to profiting from type-in traffic is getting your keyword research right.
You need to find keyword phrases that are searched a sufficient number of times daily and, of course, the appropriate .
com name still has to be available.
If the name you would like to register is already gone, it might be a good idea to take a look at...
Misspellings and Typos You've probably noticed these yourself: you quickly type a URL into your browser's address bar, hit enter and arrive at a site that doesn't look like the one you were expecting.
Then you notice that you entered a typo in the domain name.
Some clever domainer has anticipated this and registered the domain name with the typo.
So every time someone enters this misspelled domain name (and it happens more often than you might think), they land on his page instead of the page they were looking for.
What's the use, you might ask? Most likely this domainer is making some money off of the ads that he has placed on the site.
When people arrive at the site, expecting to see their familiar site, they might immediately click the back button.
Others, though, will stay and look around the site.
They may not even notice at first that they have landed on the wrong page.
If they happen to find a link that interests them, they might click it and Mr.
or Mrs.
domainer earns a couple of cents.
And all he needed to do was register the misspelled domain name and put a template and ads on it.
A good example of making use of misspellings would be our example from above.
If dressshoes.
com is already gone, you could try dresshoes.
com (notice the missing 's').
There might still be enough traffic from the typos to vouch for registering the domain.
If you enter these domain names into Google you will see what I mean.
These are just the basics of how domainers do business.
There's a lot more to it, such as domain "tasting", finding the right parking service or buying and selling domains at auctions or on forums.
However you approach domaining, you will soon notice that it's a fascinating and lucrative business model.