How I turned a website with little traffic and no profit into a $10 a day profit machine

Pay attention, because these are concrete, specific tips of the kind that are not usually shared in the domain name industry.

I have a blog – whose name I will not furnish because I don’t want to violate any Adsense rules - where I write reviews of money transfer services. Not the most exciting of subjects perhaps, but important to the millions of people who regularly send remittances overseas. I don’t publish new material often – one article per month or so – but I do write the articles myself and I try to make them useful.

To find an article topic, I go to news.google.com and do a search for “money transfer”. As I sift through the results I ignore press releases. I keep scrolling until I find a genuine news piece. I read it, absorb the info, then summarize it into a concise article, using my own phrasing and adding my own observations. This usually takes about half an hour.

Alternatively, I look at my stats to see what search phrases readers are using to find my website. I take one of the more popular phrases, do my own search and read up on that subject, and write an article about it.

I also occasionally answer readers’ questions about problems they may be having with online transfer systems or online bank accounts.

The website was created with WordPress, is monetized with Google Adsense, and has always paid quite well per click. The problem has been the lack of traffic, and the low CTR. There is some search traffic, but not enough to generate significant income. Recently I decided to try driving traffic to the website with Google Adwords. I was able to get traffic for as little as 2 cents per click, but the problem was that the Adsense CTR (click through rate) was quite low, on the order of 1.5 percent.

To address this issue, I installed the Heatmap theme, which is an Adsense-optimized WordPress theme. I monetized the website fully, with five Adsense units on each page, three of those being ad units, and two link units, using the sizes and placements recommended by the Heatmap theme. I used the Adsense Injection plugin to place some of the ads strategically.

Initially I set the Adsense ads to image and text, which is the default setting. With the new ad placements, the CTR climbed to between 5% and 7%. Then I tried setting the ads to text only, no images, and I saw another jump in CTR, to between 10% and 15%.

Yes, the ads are a bit over the top. They do somewhat take over the website. But it worked. With the CTR as high as it is, I can now drive traffic with Adwords and make a profit. I spend about $3 per day advertising this site with Adwords, and it generates about $15 per day on Adsense. So it’s quite a good profit for a website that requires a time investment of 30 minutes per month.

The next challenge will be to bring in traffic from other sources, and to update the website more frequently – perhaps once every three or four days – with new articles. I may do this myself, or contract it out, but the key is that the articles must be quality writing, with useful tips and news. Content is still king.

I’ve had good luck selling “proper name” domain names, by which I mean common names like AprilSmith.com, JohnLouis.com, etc. I buy these at auction for the minimum bid (usually around $60), and I’ve sold some for several hundred dollars. I just sold MattGreene.com for $200. The buyer was – you guessed it – Matt Greene. That’s the best part about these proper name domains. You don’t have to market them or go looking for buyers. With any common name there are usually hundreds of people who have that name, and sooner or later one of them will contact you about buying the name.

With MattGreene.com, $200 is not a huge amount of money, but it’s still a decent profit for minimal work.

So if you’re looking for a simple investment that is sure to turn a profit, look for these common proper names. Don’t pay more than the minimum bid or a few bucks over, then just park it and wait for that person to come calling.

UPDATE: (Auction is over, domain name is sold).

The domain name Battl.com is up for auction at Sedo. See the auction page here:

Battle.com auction page

Battl.com gets good traffic and is profitable. It’s a quality domain name, one of my best.

This domain is perfect for a MMRPG website (online role playing games), a brand name, live rap battles, song and dance contests, guitar battles, robot wars, and so much more. It’s a fantastic brand name for sports gear or actions toys.

The auction ends in four days, so place your bid now. Happy bidding and good luck.

The domain name BAAE.com is up for auction with the low starting price of $150.

UPDATE: The Domain has been sold for $180. Someone got a real deal! Check back for other auctions.

Click here to bid:

http://tiny.cc/gqcdb

BAAE.com is a premium 4-letter domain name (LLLL.com) with a dot com extension. A Google search for BAAE produces 392,000 results. The acronym BAAE stands for many things, including:

• British Army Antarctic Expedition
• British Airways Avionic Engineering
• Bachelor of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
• Basic and Applied Ecology
• Bay Area Automotive Enthusiasts
• Bay Area Adventures & Events
• Bachelor of Art in Art Education
• Brighton Adult Alternative Education

and many more. So as you can see BAAE is a natural letter combination that is easy to remember, easy to create an organization name, and many possible buyers. The domain name receives steady type-in traffic (50 to 70 uniques per month) and is highly marketable. The geographical breakdown is about 47.3% traffic from North America and 47.5% from Europe, so these are people with money in their pockets, easy to market to.

Clicks on Sedo pay quite well. I got a $9.76 payout on a single click once! That’s one of the highest payouts I have ever received on a single Sedo click.

I have 42 .in domain names that I am offering sale as a portfolio. These are premium generic domains. All of them were just recently renewed for another year. All serious offers will be considered. Please make an offer if you are interested.

The domains are:

labcoats.in
synagogue.in
inspect.in
evalue.in
footdoctor.in
beachhotel.in
notarization.in
eardoctor.in
propertyauction.in
discountbroker.in
sportsdoctor.in
judaism.in
appreciate.in
islamicbanks.in
islamicfinance.in
hindulife.in
hindumatch.in
hajjservices.in
hinduparty.in
hindunewspaper.in
islamicfinder.in
namaz.in (namaz means “prayer” in Urdu, which is the dominant language among India’s almost 200 million Muslims)
salat.in (another word for prayer)
hadith.in (hadith are the narrations of the Prophet Muhammad)
hindunames.in
prophetmuhammad.in
purefoods.in
islamicnames.in
indiandesign.in
sikhbabynames.in
floodinsurance.in
muslimnames.in
jainbabynames.in
hindubabynames.in
purefood.in
plasticsurgeons.in
nationalnews.in
muslimbabynames.in
healthplans.in
petsupplies.in
hinducalendar.in
realestateoffice.in

In a stunner of a development, Snapnames has discovered that one of their employees has been secretly bidding on domain names for the last four years. The employee set up a Snapnames account under a fake name and bid on domain names.

The company says in their press release that this affected only a small percentage of auctions. How much exactly is that small percentage? They go on to say:

• Bidding affected approximately five percent of total SnapNames auctions since 2005, most of which occurred between 2005 and 2007.
• The incremental revenue from the bidding represented approximately one percent of SnapNames’ auction revenue since 2005.

Five percent of all auctions since 2005? That’s huge! One percent of total auction revenue coming from one fraudulent employee? Again, that’s huge!

I have many questions about this.

1. How could this have happened? I am quite frankly shocked that this could have gone on for so long undetected. Even now it appears that the employee will retain the domain names he/she purchased.
2. How could an employee come up with the funds to purchase 1% (in revenue) of all domains? Is he independently wealthy? Or did he have a backer who colluded in this fraud and benefited from it? Maybe he was even secretly employed by someone else.
3. In their announcement, Snapnames says they have created new controls and procedures to prevent this from happening again, including, “Specific domain name registration policies for employees.” What? You mean you didn’t already have specific domain name registration policies for employees in place?
4. Does this represent a breach of the law in any way? Can this employee be prosecuted?

Snapnames will be offering a rebate to anyone who participated in an affected auction, amounting to with 5.22% interest (the highest applicable federal rate during the affected time period), to affected customers for the difference between the prices they actually paid and the prices they would have paid, had the employee not bid in the auctions.

I am curious how they will calculate this. It’s not as straightforward as it seems. Sometimes the level of activity in an auction acts as an X-factor that draws in other bidders. But this can be hard to quantify.

This is a bad development for Snapnames. Domain name discussion forums have always been rife with speculation about the presence of company “shills” in auctions. Of course that’s not what this is, since this employee acted independently and against company policy. Still, it will only feed those sorts of rumors.

I like the Snapnames system and I’ve acquired many domains through them. I expect I will be contacted regarding this rebate. I sincerely hope that Snapnames continues to address this issue openly and decisively and comes out of it stronger and wiser as a company.

VenezuelaReport.com is a magazine-style blog about life in Venezuela. It’s an attractive website built on an obviously good domain name, and I’m offering it for sale for only $2,500.

The site utilizes WordPress for easy updating, and is upgraded to the latest release. I’ve written original articles for the website over the last several months, and I’ve done a good job of optimizing the articles for the search engines. And of course, “Venezuela Report” is an extremely common keyword combination, with governments, NGOs and corporate intelligence organizations all over the world constantly writing reports on Venezuela. As a result, the site is generating steady traffic on the order of between 20 and 100 visitors per day, without the need for paid advertising. The website has already attracted a small following and a fair number of inbound links. It’s a very good buy at this price, and an excellent long-term investment.

If you are interested, please contact me through this website’s Contact Form. Thank you.

Update 8-26-2011:  VenezuelaReport is ranking quite well on Google for a variety of relevant search terms. For example, do a Google search for “life in Venezuela” and see what comes up. Consequently traffic to VenezuelaReport has increased to more than 250 visitors per day, so my price is going up as well, to $4,500. I’m also going to be experimenting with ad placements to increase CTR, using some techniques that I’ve recently been experimenting with. I think the website will be turning a nice profit soon. The sale price on this one is only going to go up, so if you are interested then act now.

I’ve been working on building a membership base for my Hapkido website, http://www.HapkidoNetwork.com. Hapkido is a Korean martial art that is a mix of hard and soft, with joint locks and circular movements, but also hard strikes. It’s got high Google rankings for “Hapkido network” and “Hapkido forum”, but so far I’ve had trouble building a membership base. 220 is not bad, but my goal is 1,000 by the end of the year. Ads on forums have notoriously low CTRs, so it will take a combination of high traffic and diverse revenue streams to make a significant profit.

VenezuelaReport.com is an online magazine/blog about life in Venezuela. I’m working on adding a discussion forum to it. The site is already ranked in the first page of Google results for the keywords “Venezuela report” and “life in Venezuela.” The domain and website are available for sale, so if you are interested, contact me.

My house in Panama is for sale, so I made use of a nice domain I had sitting around - CasaPanama.com - to build a website to showcase the house. That’s one good thing about buying reams of domain names in areas that interest you: whenever you need a good domain name for a project, there it is.

I happen to own Greenport.org - Greenport is a “historic village” and summer getaway on Long Island, New York. Rather than waste such a promising domain name on parking, I thought I would develop it into a resource and guide for the town of Greenport. I’ll be doing that soon.

I also plan to build a website about developing solar energy technologies. That field is already big and will only get bigger. I own several relevant domains and it’s just a matter of choosing one, doing the work, and doing the research.

More and more, however, I’m realizing that it would be more profitable to build an online application. Blogs are fun and inexpensive to build, but the real traffic magnets are useful interactive applications that allow people to do something. I know this is rather an obvious point, but I think many domainers miss it. I have some ideas in this area but it’s too soon to share them. I’ll keep you posted.

Happy new year and may this year bring you continued health, increased wealth and blessings in all areas of your lives.

I read recently on TheConceptualist.com that Bido.com domain name auctions will be returning soon. I will definitely have to submit some of my better domain names for inclusion.

The auction of PuntaPacifica.com went reasonably well, with the domain selling for $4,000.

I own a few good geo names with .org and .net extensions, and I’ve been thinking of developing these.

My social network for martial artists, HapkidoNet.com, is progressing nicely. Thank you to those who helped me choose the best domain name for that site.

My new year’s advice to my readers: keep your head up, breathe deep, and discover the sources of your own strength.

PuntaPacifica.com is up for auction at Sedo right now. Punta Pacifica (“Pacific Point” in Spanish) is the newest and most expensive neighborhood in Panama City, Panama, which itelf is a bustling and fast growing metropolis with a mixture of skyscrapers and charming old architecture, perched on the famous Panama Canal.

Click here for the Sedo auction:

http://www.sedo.com/auction/auction_detail.php?language=e&auction_id=44912&tracked=&partnerid=14460

The domain name has already received a bid of $1,000 but is worth much more. At this moment several skyscrapers are going up in the oceanfront neighborhood of Punta Pacifica with condo prices as high as a million dollars; many more buildings are in the planning stages. This is quite simply the most exciting, exclusive growing neighborhood in all of Latin America.

This domain name would be excellent for a developer or real estate agent. For domainers or speculators, consider parking the domain (it gets traffic and earns steady parking revenue) or working out a commission arrangement with a developer or real estate agent. The commission from a single condo sale could be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

This is a superb geo domain at a rock bottom price. The auction is running so place your bid now!