Well, okey, time to wrap this honeymoon stuff up and summarize what I have done and learned the last 2-3 months. During november-december last year (2008) there was a “discounting fight” between the two largest domain registrars in Sweden at the moment - Loopia and Binero - which made me dive into the domaining business again, after a long absence. I already had a smaller list of domains and topic I was interested in purchasing, but since the pricing was so low ($0.13 for a .SE domain at one point), I made an effort to come up with all kinds of domains in alla kinds of areas. During this time I discovered two excellent tools from Google which really can help determine if a domain/keyword is worth to register:

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator - shows how many advertisors a certain keyword has and how many $ they spend on a keyword on average

Google Keyword Tool - show the searchvolume for keywords as well as helps you find related keywords

During this time I also developed my own search tool - a sort of domain search spider - which would scan pages for distinct words, put them in a database and check their availability. It also made a list of outgoing links, which were added to a table with URL’s to scan next. More on this tool in an upcoming post.

I started by making lists of topics and keywords for which I wanted to buy domains in, as well as scanning for lists with for example vacation resorts swedish people like to visit. Using the above tools and the fact that the tools generate related keywords for me I could search and search and come up with a shitload of available domains still available for me to hand register. Cool, or what? Well, at this point I didn’t really know if any of the domains whould generate any traffic, it’s not like the tools above guarantee that I will get my share of the traffic and Adsense dollars indicated by them.

Next step was basically to park them on a domain parking site. I choose Namedrive for them all since I’d heard that they are good for European domains. I let them sit there for about a month and suprisingly many of then were getting type-in traffic.

During the time my domains were parked on Namedrive, I developed my own domain parking solution, which I intended to use in my 4-phased domain launch strategy. I’m pretty sure that the sooner you get your domains (the ones you intend to build mini- or macro sites on) into the search engines - the better. The purpose of my parking solution was

1. get 100% of advertising revenue
2. better statistics
3. fast domain flips - going from parked to mini-site status in a few minutes
4. support of incremental mini-site development

I might make a post about the basic design of this solution later on.

So, a month of parking on Namedrive went by and I exported a list of all domains to Excel and decided to work my way through the list backwards - meaning that I would start making mini-sites of the domains that didn’t get any type-ins during the first month as parked domains. I decided to make them into mini-sites using 4 phases, since I’m pretty sure that Google likes to see that your site is changed from time to time and not filled with Adsense from day 1. The phases are roughly outlined below:

phase 1: make a simple landing page with a description of what this site will consist of - fill in the meta tags description and keywords. Also add a contact form - so if a rich prospector needs to get incontact with you, they can. Add your site in a catalogue in order for Google to find it.

phase 2: after Google has indexed the phase 1 version - add related RSS feeds on landing page

phase 3: when phase 3 has been indexed - add 1-2 pages with related and useful content

phase 4: (might be done in phase 3) put Adsense on the website

It is said that having Adsense on your domain from day 1 will trigger some red flag with Google, something you don’t want when developing mini-sites. I’m not sure if they flag affiliate banners as well. Do you know?

This is basically where I am right now - I have about 40 domains left of the “never-visited” domains to throw out to Google. Most domains are in phase 2, some in phase 1 and next week I will probably start to move some into phase 3/4 and hopefully start making Adsense money.

Technorati Tags: domaining, adsense, adwords, namedrive, loopia, binero, domain parking, domains, affiliate, mini-sites