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.

A few months ago I was browsing some of the domains coming up for auction at NameJet and I had the idea to see what sorts of common people’s names – I mean the names are common, not the people – might be dropping. I looked at several names and ran Google searches on them, studied the results, and considered their search popularity.

I ended up back ordering a handful of names, and won several at the minimum bid of $69 each. These included AprilWilliams.com, LauraVega.com, and MattGreene.com. I thought I might contact some of the people with those names and try to sell them the domains. As it turned out I got busy with other things, but only a few months later I received an offer for AprilWilliams.com through Sedo, and sold it for $500.

If you’ve been trying to acquire generic domains at auction and getting outbid, you might try some real “names”. If they’re common enough there’s sure to be a market and a steady trickle of traffic, and at the moment there’s not a lot of competition for these domains.

My recent article, “How to Find Great Domain Names: 12 Super Tips” has proved enormously popular and has received thousands of views.

In one part of the article I wrote, “Ignore trends that may have a cult following but are not widely known. For example, I recently read about a new trend among photography hobbyists called lomography. I tasted several domains related to this trend but found that they got no traffic, so I let them drop. Instead look for trends that have the potential to be huge.”

One of my readers, “woolwit,” was intrigued by the mention of domain tasting and asked the following question:

“Excellent article and a great reference for creative domaining. You mention domain tasting in the article. I’ve always assumed that it was only the big bulk domainers who had access to domain tasting. Would you consider writing a short How-To taste domains for the rest of us? I’ve looked around on GoDaddy and not found anything. Can you recommend a registrar who makes tasting available one domain at a time?”

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, let me say first that I’m opposed to domain tasting. The big tasting companies use automated scripts and sneaky tactics of all kinds to taste domains by the millions, keeping the ones that make a few pennies and throwing the rest back. They’re very secretive about ownership and are generally located offshore. I think it’s bad for the industry and unfair to individual domainers, and I’m in favor of abolishing it altogether. In particular the practice of churning vast numbers of domains but registering none, keeping them in an endless trial period loop, is disgusting.

Until that day comes, however, I do make use of domain tasting on a small scale. I’m talking one or two domains at a time. I think that tasting in this manner is a reasonable way for a domainer with a limited budget to try out ideas without racking up a big credit card bill.

Last year I did a lot of searching, trying to find an affordable tasting solution for the little guy, and I finally found TastingGenie, which bills itself as “Domain tasting for the masses.” It’s run by a registrar called MindGenies.

By the way, this is not an affiliate link or paid post. I don’t get anything for recommending them. I’m simply helping out my readers.

At TastingGenie you pay $100 up front to set up an account. They have sort of a complicated pricing scheme with different plans to choose from, but what it basically amounts to is that you pay as little as 7 cents per domain to taste. They are partnered with DomainSponsor.com, you’ll need an account there. Each domain that you taste is automatically configured with DomainSponsor’s nameservers, and you then go to your DomainSponsor account and add the domain.

The tasting period is 4.5 days. If you do nothing, TastingGenie will automatically drop the domain name. If you want to keep it, you must log in to your TastingGenie account and select the domain name to keep. At that point it will be registered at MindGenies for $7.25. That money will be taken out of your $100 credit that you started with.

I’ve been satisfied with TastingGenie’s service and I think it’s a good way to try out a few domain ideas every now and then without ending up with a lot of useless no-traffic domain names.

I’ve decided to write an e-book on domaining. True, I started in 2005 which makes me a latecomer to the domain name industry. Also true that I have not made millions of dollars (yet), though I do own upwards of 2,000 domain names that earn good parking income and I have made many good sales.

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Do you feel like it’s too late to get into domaining? Does it seem like all the good domains are gone? Are you looking for concrete advice, and not finding it? Well, here you go. Some of these are tactics that have worked very well for me. Others I have borrowed from top domainers and tips I’ve spotted on domain discussion forums over the years.

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“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

- Thomas Edison

Having a hard time with this domain name business? Or for that matter, with any other challenge you’re facing in life? Have you been working at it for a long time and starting to feel like you’re not going to get there?

Don’t give up, evolve. Learn from your mistakes.

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No, not mine… I’m talking about DNBizBlog.com. I came across this blog last week, and though it’s still freshly minted with only four posts, I’m very impressed with what I’ve read so far. The author, who goes simply by the handle ASN5, is a programmer and domainer from way back who registered his first domain in 1994.

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In my previous post I mentioned Sedo’s ongoing premium dot Mobi auction and suggested two of my own domain names, installer.mobi and updater.mobi, that were included in the auction. I’m not quite satisfied with the results of the auction, but I can live with it.

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Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 – 1931)

Many new domainers feel that the domain name train has left the station. They look at the pioneers like Rick Schwartz, Frank Schilling and Kevin Ham and think, “Those guys took all the good names. There’s nothing left. It was a one-time deal.” Is that true? Can you still get rich with domain names, or is it too late?

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