Teen Domainer » My Projects

9990% Flip with Godaddy Premium Listings

TeenDomainer — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:41:44 +0000

Since 2009 the stock market (DOW) has moved from 8,000 to around 12,000 which is a huge increase in value. Also in 2009 I purchased the domain PoopBeGone.com for $10 on namepros. Over the 3 years which I owned the domain I received 8 emails about the name with a few leading to small offers that never amounted to anything.

Although the offers were small they did tell me that the name was worth something so I listed it on Godaddy's Premium listings for $999. I list many of my names on their system that I think are suited for end users hoping that one day someone will type it in and buy it.

Would this name have ever sold on Sedo or Afternic for this price?

Possibly, but I doubt it. They may have better systems and much lower commissions, but Godaddy has the eyeballs.

Godaddy's system is not great, they take 30% of the sale so make sure to price your names with that factored in. They also take quite a long time to send the check. I just got mine and this name sold in early November.

In three years my $10 name purchase turned into $999 ($665 in my pocket after the fees). Is it not a huge sale, but looking at the percentages the return on investment is unmatched. In my small portfolio I have a handful of names that I did not buy to develop, but with the sole plan to sell to final users. It seems that a few of them sell each year passively. I'm a much bigger fan of development, but sales are never a bad thing!

Have a great weekend!

What I Wish I Did in 2011

TeenDomainer — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:03:33 +0000

2011 was a great year for me, I have almost no complaints. I'm 19 years old and am enjoying every second of life. That being said there are always things that when we look back we wish we would have done so I am going to run through some of mine that relate to domain names for this last year.

1. Updated my Sites More

With college and running I neglected to keep adding articles and links which hurt my revenue. My sites survived but now instead of just doing a little work on a few sites over break I am going through each one and fixing them back up so that 2012 starts off great. Not updating some sites in 2011 cost me.

2. Stayed on top of the Drops.

For a while I was able to keep looking at drops every night, but when choosing between looking at dropping domain names and college parties, I hope everyone would make the same choice I did and go out. Now with some new tools I am trying out I plan to get back into the action.

3. Dropped More Domains

While I think auto renew is a great way to make sure you do not ever forget a good name, some of the names I picked up in my middle school days domaining are frankly awful. I need to drop them but again things got in the way like homework and exams so I kept seeing emails from godaddy about charger to my credit card to renew worthless domains. The money could have been much better spent.

4. Add a For Sale Link to my Parked Names

This Year I finally moved all of my domain to a parking provider (DomainPower) before most of them were doing nothing. My names do not get much traffic, but they make a few bucks each month. The biggest thing I was able to do was add a banner on the top that says this domain is for sale. This increased sales and offers and led to my best month of the year in November. Make it easy for the buyers to contact you!

5. Stay More Connected via Blog and Social Media

I really enjoy the domain community and by not blogging or checking into social media sites I felt out of the loop. I would check on Domaining.com every now and then but I was not as involved as I had been in the past. I missed the interaction and the fun that every day brings. So in 2012 I look to do more and carry on more conversations.

What did you not do in 2012 that you are going to do this year?

Holiday Updates

TeenDomainer — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:48:35 +0000

It is amazing to me that 2011 is already coming to an end. I have not blogged much in the last few months because of something called college which took up most of my time, but I just wanted to update some of my readers with what I have been working on. Just because I have not been blogging does not mean that I have not been buying, selling, and building out domain names!

In November I had two great flips on names that I purchased for low $xx and sold for over $1500 combined. This is what makes domaining great. I will share more details on this flip later.

I'm going to avoid the term "minisites" but my small websites have been doing great. During college they passively support me, I neglected them and missed updating a few which is what I will be spending my break working on. I am also building a few more out. I also plan on moving some of my larger sites to a new host.

WordPress Security is something that you need to stay on top of. Make sure you keep everything updated!

End Users - I stopped emailing and calling end users earlier this year because of time, but I have picked up some names that scream out to end users. Morgan has given me the motivation to pick up the phone again!

My joke site about Kim Jong Un is still going strong and just hit over 3,000 likes on facebook!

Last of all college is amazing! It's nice to be home, but my first semester at school could not have been better! Running, friends, academics its all too good in Atlanta at Emory.

I am working on getting one more nice sale in before the year ends, fingers crossed

I hope all of your Holidays were great enjoy the rest of the year, but just letting you know there are some nice names dropping...

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Kim Jong-Un Site Goes Viral

TeenDomainer — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:37:29 +0000

As you may have seen in the news lately Kim Jong Il the ruthless leader of North Korea died a few days ago. What you may not have know is that there was a very popular website named Kim Jong Il Looking at Things. When I heard the news of KJI's death I realized that the website will have to stop because they will be out of pictures. Then I realized that there will be another leader of North Korea and being the domainer that I am, I quickly registered Kim Jong Un Looking at Things.

I then had my wisdom teeth removed and was stuck in bed all day with nothing better to do so I built the website, and people started to visit it. The theme is from Themeforest and all I had to do were a few simple modifications and upload a few plugins and the site was live in an hour. That's the glory of wordpress.

The first day I had it live it had over 700 visits in half a day, then yesterday it had well over 2,000 visits and over 3,000 views and today looks like it is going to be another record day.

To generate traffic I submitted the site to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, posted it on my Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus account. On Facebook my page currently has over 1,600 likes and growing. On Twitter growth has been slow with over 1,000 followers but no real interaction. I also commented on a number of blogs and new stories about the original site which drove some traffic.

But now I stand at a cross roads. What should I do with the site next? There are not too many pictures of Kim Jong Un left (hopefully they take some more soon) and I do not want the site to die out. I am not even a very funny guy so I think that I might be leading the site to its own death myself. I thought (and still debate) putting the site up for sale on Flippa or eBay, but I have no idea what to value it at. Obviously it has some worth with the traffic and could have much more as it grows.

For now I am going to keep looking for more pictures and a way to get the site to really take off. I am also running a photo caption contest on the site where I am going to give out cash to the top 3 people who send in a photo with a funny caption. I know it is very close I just need a little boost. Take a look at the site let me know what you think and have a great day!

*Update Just got an email from a visitor who said he just heard about the site on 102.9 The Hog in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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TeenDomainer Does College and Domaining

TeenDomainer — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:54:45 +0000

It's been the busiest time of my life, but I can now say I am done with my first quarter of college. I am in Atlanta at Emory University having a great time, the only issue I have is my lack of time for domaining. Midterms, parties, and sleep now take up a huge chunk of my time. I am also on the cross country team (which is now ranked number 1 in our south east region) which takes up a few hours every day in addition to all of the school work and other clubs I have become involved with. But somehow I still find a little time to keep up with the industry which I love.

The great thing about passive income is that while I have had less time my passive income from my minisites has gone UP! Some of the updates I made in the summer have help increased ranking and conversions. Less time more money! Imagine that. (Take a look at the ranking for spypen.net) ((number 1 or 2 on google!) Right now I am trying to go around to my top sites again and update them so their ranking does not fall off. This is why domaining makes a great college job. You can put in what time you have. While I have been in college the end user emails trickle in and advertising request do the same, and every month I collect my checks to spend on fun.

I am not as concentrated on buying drops or selling names as I once was; I am now going to build out many more of the names I have been waiting on to develop because of the success I have had with my current minisites. I have also found some great new tools and tips that I will be sharing with you because I know from my own sites that development is a great way to go if you do it the right way with the right names. I plan on trying to blog a few times a week to keep you updated.

Other than that I am living the dream up at school enjoying what I am told will be the best four years of my life!

Summer Recap of My Internship at Domain Holdings Building Minisites

TeenDomainer — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:00:36 +0000

This is a copy of a Post I wrote for the Domain Holdings Blog.

This summer I had the amazing opportunity to start working at Domain Holdings. It is an experience that I will never forget and I am so grateful for the time I spent working as a member of the team at DH. To my current clients, fear not, I will still be handling ministe development and consulting for DH remotely from up here in Atlanta.

My main focus this summer was to assist with the rollout of the Domain Holdings minisites offering. Domain Holdings already offers rapid platform development – DomainPower – for larger portfolio owners and premium development for killer category names, but did not have a solid middle-tier option. Minisites fit perfectly between the two ends of the development spectrum. While a minisite is not the perfect solution for every name, there are many domain names that can utilize a minisite to increase their value.

Over the summer, Domain Holdings clients ordered hundreds of minisites and I had the unique perspective to pour over hundreds of data points and see what types of names people were building on and what was working on a macro level.

Why do people like our minisites?

With a Domain Holdings minisite, clients get a custom WordPress theme and unique content on all of their sites. The domain owner also keeps 100% of the revenue and can use their own Ad-Sense or affiliate accounts. Domains can be hosted on their own hosting account, so they don’t run into problems with having too many names on the same DNS. Finally, the WordPress sites are easy to customize and update.

To get an idea of the kinds of increase in numbers, here’s an example. Our co-founder Chad Folkening had us build out 30 minisites and we were able to increase traffic by nearly 40% and revenue by 13.5% over parking.

After looking at all of the data here are two types of names that seemed to work well as minisites.

Poorly Converting Parked Names

The first is parked names that get traffic, but do not convert well. For example, on Nanotechnology.com we were able to increase revenue by 900% and bring in over 50% of the traffic from search engines. The reason for the increase is because a minisite will be able to provide relevant ads that parking feeds simply cannot.

Longtail Names

The second group of names that do well as minisites are longer domains that get no traffic while parked, but do get some searches. In the Google keyword tool, the numbers that seem to be working well are from as low as 300 up to about 2,000 exact matches. It does depend on how competitive the category is. The more competitive means a higher CPC, but it is harder to get ranked. If the area is more competitive, it just means that some link building or more content will be required to rank.

We built out a few different sizes of sites over the summer to fit all different markets. It has been said before and I will say it again, content is very important. The more you have the better off you will be. We start with a minimum of four articles and can go up as high as a client requests. Using duplicate content will not help your site in the long run.

If you think you might have some names that will work for minisites, I would love to take a look at them and give you some feedback. Email me at Brian@domainholdings.com.

Later this week I hope to write a post about how the start of college at Emory is going! (hint hint college is a blast!)

Building Minisites Has Made Me Smarter

Does this minisite look like a $1,200 a year site?

TeenDomainer — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:57:01 +0000

People say minisites are dead. I have said some minisites are dead.

Turns out some minsites might not be dead after all.

Take a look at RentaCargoVan.com Does it look like a site the earned $102.92 last month? No.

The site is nothing special, a minisite with a few pages of unique content, custom descriptions, a custom header and Google adsense. I think the site could be earning so much more money using affiliate programs, but I made the mistake and signed up for the Budget rental car program when I meant to sign up Budget rental truck program. So I have applied and hopefully will be able to add the new links to Budget soon. The contact form on the site now goes right to my email and I originally tried to call rental centers and sell the leads, but that was a failure, but it still gets 5+ submissions a day.

Google has made updates, but the truth is that an exact match domain with UNIQUE content can do very well. The domain has 880 exact match local searches, and a cpc of $2.65 not killer stats by any means. The site does not look amazing, but has an almost 10% click through rate. It had 504 unique visits last month with 1,258 uniques.

All of this traffic is from Google, Yahoo and Bing, none from direct navigation. I paid $15 for the name a few months back on a godaddy auction and spent few hours one day developing it out. I have done some social bookmakring and minor SEO onsite, but the site has no amazing links and I really have not spent much time on it with SEO and it is on track to earn even more this month. It gets most of its traffic from long tail searches like unlimited mileage, and one war cargo van rentals.

This is one of my better examples of a minisite that does really well, but I have many that earn steady revenue with adsense, amazon and ebay. A name like this would have made nothing as a parked page and just because of simple development it will earn me over $1,000 this year.

(Click on image to see full google analytics stats)

Since Google's panda update this site has done much better in the search engines and I am loving minisite development post panda. Why? Because I make unique sites that are helpful to users and show them what they are looking for. I think it also scared some people away from minisite development which is fine by me.

I have said for a while one page spun content sites are clearly dead, but unique minisites are alive and well. Next time you go out and declare something dead, you might what to check it pulse first; because to me minisites look healthy and better than ever.

Summertime Weekend Updates

TeenDomainer — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:11:04 +0000

Another week is finishing up and its been a hot one here in Florida, with the only bad news being the Heat basketball team but hopefully they can recover tonight.

First thought is that minisites are not dead and I will past proof about that tomorrow. Things have changed over the years but with the right names and tools you can still make money off of minisites. They might even be better off now than in the past few years because many of the content farms are out of the way. When I say minisite I mean a site with a few unique articles not some one page site or auto blog.

I need to make better use of my time, I wrote out a list of my top sites that make money and I noticed I spend the least amount of time on some of my highest earning sites, so I made a goal to update them with new content and possibly redo the designs this month.

Summer is development time, and I have the bug again. I am going to try out a few new verticals and also go back to some ones that I already have sites in that are doing well. I am going to do a few mini sites and then a few larger sits that start off with 10+ pages of content.

I added a new product to my SpyPen sites a micro universal remote control which can lock onto any TV. It is really fun to bring into a sports bar during a big game and switch the channel, it also is fun at bestbuy to turn off every TV.

Dropbox is a great program if you use more than one computer or need to share files with a person and its free for up to 2GB of storage.

I also have my first college assignment, but it is only an online hour long course, but its scary to think that college is almost here for the teen domainer.

Lets go Heat!

Case Study: My WhyPark Sites Rank Well

TeenDomainer — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:32:12 +0000

I was looking at some of my rankings of my WhyPark domain names this weekend and I was really excited about how well they are doing. I have a few names on their system and the results are much better than expected. I talked about adding my names to their system months ago. Some names I originally put them on the whypark as a pre development and I just have not had the time to build them out, other I added to see if they would rank and then I could sell them to end users.

None of the names are very competitive, but remember I have not done anything with the names and they do not have unique content. Here are a few examples

My Results

HebrewTutors.com Ranking 4th and I have had 2 offers to buy the name. Its curently in development

RepairMyFence.com This one is trying to be sold to end users it Ranks 3rd and I have had one offer to buy it

SignLanguageTutors.com Ranking 5th I am going to also be developing this name when I get the time.

SpyPen.info does not rank for its exact term but brings in long tail traffic and drives a visit or two to my main spy site spypen.net and also gives it links. I really like how easy it is to build out a mini mini site like this to drive traffic and links to a main site.

While the sites have not been huge money makers, the high rankings have done a few things that without whypark would not be possible. I have had offers to buy the domain names from the sites, the ranking also increases the value of the domain to an end user and for myself it helps it get a head start on development and ranking well. With a few articles of unique content and some links I think that whypark sites could do great.

If you have domains you want to try sign up for an account today. The domain apps are easy to use and install and the support team is really first class. I will be trying to see if I can get a few more of my end user domain names to rank easily using whypark, 1 or 2 unique articles and a few links.

I Removed Inbound Links and My Search Engine Rank Improved

TeenDomainer — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:13:25 +0000

All you ever read is that to get ranked high in Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you need links. But lately Google and others have been commenting and making changes to their algorithm that take into account the quality of links point to a web site. This week I found out firsthand that link quality links really matter.

When I was first building out SpyPen.net, I did not have a search engine optimization strategy, I just put up some products, pictures, and content. One day while I was browsing Namepros I saw someone offering a few blogroll links across a few of their small blogs for six months for a few bucks. I thought it would be good for my site to get all of the in-bond links, but it turns out they hurt the site.

Because all of the pages that were linking in were unrelated to my content, Google punished my site for looking like I was trying to spam the site. SpyPen.net was on page 1 of Google before I added the links and then after a few weeks it went back to Page 2 and I could not figure out why. After some research I asked for the links to be removed from the blogs and a few days after doing that it was back to page 1.

Right now for me, it show up as the last listing on page 1 and hopefully with more quality links (like I got yesterday from GadgetKing.com but I will tell you about that later) and content I can improve it from there.

So yes, I had always heard that the quality of links matter, but not till I saw if first hand did it hit me how much google knew about quality of links. If you have an old site you you are trying to rank well for and maybe a long time ago you ordered some bad links take the time and go back and remove them.