Two and a half cents a day on your way to a profitable empire

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

I buy my domain names from mydomain.com, they cost me US$8.75 per year.

There are 365 days in a year. If a domain name makes 2.4 cents a day, it is profitable for me.

Looking at it another way, the sites need to make me 16.8 cents a week. Everything above this is profit. (I don’t count hosting, it’s so damned cheap as to virtually be free anyway, especially a decent reseller account where I have upward of 50 domains hosted for $12.95 a month (around 25 cents a month per site)).

Even if we want to include hosting at that 25 cents a month, I only need to makea bout $0.98 a month to be in the black.

I’m finding that looking at my empire in this way is a very effective way to break down my online business. As long as each domain turns a profit every year, and requires minimal input from me, I can just keep re-investing my profits back into more domain names, until at some point I decide to stop building more sites and start keeping the profits for myself.

So once again, my sites need to make $0.98 a month to be profitable (and this figure will become less and less as I add more domains onto my hosting account (I can host up to 125 domains with the provider I’m with).

So what does it take to make $0.98 a month from one of these domains? I’m going to tell you:

A page of content and some backlinks.

Here’s the process:

1. Scoot on over to my Niche Idea Generator, and just keep hitting the refresh button until you come across something that takes your fancy.
2. Click the link provided for that niche subject, and take a look at what products, and what price range there are available from Amazon for that niche.
3. Once you’ve selected a niche with a reasonable amount of products, hop on over to my Keyword Competition Analyser, and kick that keyword into the search box.
4. Check out the stats of some of the sites listed; we’re especially after niches where there are a few sites in the top 10 who don’t have the keyword in the page title or meta description, and they don’t have a ridiculously high number of backlinks to that specific page. You also want to take this opportunity to click the “More information for this keyword from WordTracker” link, to see what the search volume is for that specific keyword. You might also want to write down the first half-dozen or so suggested keywords that WordTracker throws back at you as well.
5. If you look at the sites for the niche you’ve chosen, and decide that the competition is too high or the search volume is too low, go back to the start and try again.
6. So we now have a niche chosen, we need to go find a domain name: Here we use a tip from Mark at 45N5: Head on over to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and drop your niche keywords in the box. Export the resultant keyword list to a text file, open the text file and copy it to your clipboard. Now go to your domain registrar of choice, and paste that nice long list into their multiple domain search box. The domain registrar should then present you with a list of domains which are available for you to choose from. Make sure that the domain you choose contains your niche keyword.
7. Once you’ve set up your domain and hosting, we need to get a page up on that domain. That’s right, a single page. (If the site turns out to be particularly successful after a few months, you could build the site out into a complete multi-page site then.)
8. I find that using free templates for these pages works the best. They’re free, for a start, they usually look pretty decent, and they save me a lot of time in putting the page together. I find the free templates from Andreas Viklund to be particularly well suited to this purpose, as they look good, have good CSS, and are generally pretty well SEO’d. (SEO is an important part of this process.)
9. Once we have our template we need to write some content. Keep in mind here that we want the content to be human readable, whilst including our keywords. A little research wouldn’t go astray here - Wikipedia is generally a good source of information about a product, but remember, you need to write genuinely original content. I generally stick to the following principle:Make sure that your main keyword is in the page title (as close as possible to the start), in your meta description, in your H1 and H2 tags, and appearing at least once in your first paragraph.
10. As to the rest of the keywords you wrote down in step 4 from WordTracker, I find that a good way to get a list of keywords into a page without the page looking spammy is in a list. Try to work a list in after your first or second paragraph, but remember, make the paragraph text before the list introduce the list, don’t just drop a list of keywords in out of the blue.
11. Whilst creating the content for your page, it’s a good idea to link out at least once, maybe more, to authority sites in your chosen niche. (A good way to do this is to link to a Wikipedia article or an Amazon product page)
12. Now that we have our single page site set up, we need to go get some links. This is the hardest part of any SEO campaign. We need to try to get relevant backlinks to our site, without pissing anyone off.
13. The best way to get your links from relevant sites it to hit technorati, and do a search for your keywords. Once you’ve found a bunch of blog posts, go drop a useful, non-spammy comment on the post, using your new site’s URL as the link.
14. Now would also be a good time to drop a site-wide link on your own personal blog, using your keyword as your anchor text. I know that the link will be coming from an irrelevant site, but every bit helps, and it will help in getting your site crawled and indexed quicker.
15. I’d aim for a good 8 to 15 links initially, then maybe once a month go drop another handful of links until you start to see your site appear in the rankings for your keywords.

Now that we have our site up and running, let’s talk about monetisation. Remembering that we need to make something like a buck a month to be profitable, we could throw some prominent AdSense ads on the site, in the hope that we get something like 5 clicks a month, or hit the site with some Amazon links. If you’re an Amazon noob who’s not selling much, they’ll pay you 4% for each sale (6% if you sell more than 6 items in a month). So at 4%, we need to sell around $25 worth of stuff to make our one buck. This shouldn’t be too difficult once we start to see some search engine traffic.

So there you have it, the Pimp’s guide to a profitable domain in fifteen simple steps. Give it a try, I think you’ll find it quite successful!