Domains for the win

Messing around with automated strategies through a sports betting API; online real-estate acquisition for an export business; experiments with natural language processing and automated topic identification; random drive-by purchase on flippa. What do all of these have in common? They were all ways in which I acquired random (and often seemingly pointless) domains over the years. Often supporting some experimentation with new tech, or helping me learn something that may prove useful at some point, the vast moajority have served their purpose over the years. I've never really gotten around to letting them lapse (they're all setup to autorenew through my domain provider), probably always having something in the back of my mind about maybe spending a bit of time doing something with them. So given we're here to make some money, lets take a deeper look at what we have, and whether there are any diamonds in the rough that may lift us out of mediocrity and into the life of riley.

What if we just sold them all? Putting the list through an 'online domain valuation tool' (tht service just rolls off the tongue, right?) yields some interesting, albeit not awe inspiring results. 28 domains in the first tranche that we should look at; total estimated value: just under £25k.

Not bad (albeit unlikely to be at all realistic), but it won't really cut it in terms of our long term goal (and after all, what better source of some residual income than some monstrously successful website that captures the imagination of the world). We've talked about our targets before (see the numbers page), and if we think about that £5k alternative income target, we can see pretty easily how even a few tens of dollars a month from a handful of these properties could start to make a nice dent. If 10 of these sites make £50 a month on average, that would nock off 10% of our total (all the usual caveats of costs, taxes, etc aside). So, if we're not going to sell them (at least just yet), that means we're going to do something with them. What are the options?

blog

Regularly updated flow of the greatest content adsense can monetize

service

Let's build some tools or services that fill a need (and hopefully justify some money changing hands). Could be standalone software, SAAS, plugins, who knows...

site

Full content site, rich in detail and attracting plenty of eyeballs from which to launch affiliate or other monetization strategies.

community

Something focussed around getting people involved. Might be a discussion forum or user generated content site.

aggregator

Automated content curation to generate a goto location for a specific niche or area of interest.

placeholder

Meh, nothing springs to mind just yet - could sell these, or hang on to them until inspiration strikes.

Working through the list of what we have to play with, there are a good number which align to one or more of those options. We'll start to pick them off slowly and you'll see posts on here about what we;re doing (i.e. how we're tackling the niche or service we're trying to build) and also what that means for our overall financial targets. It might get a bit technical (it's what I do, after all), but hopefully there'll be enough interesting titbits in there about marketing, SEO, accessibility, performance and all the other bits that go into a successful online presence, to keep the non-geek audience members interested.

You'll note that we've obscured the full domain for each of the entries in the list - we thought it would be more fun to drip-feed these in as and when we start to pickup the build-out of each platform, that way we keep the sense of suspense (!).

OK, so we have the list; we have the options; we have the drama of the slow reveal, where do we start?! Let's pick our first domain and start the ball rolling next week with what we're going to do with it. We'll start with something straightforward (nobody remind me I said that in the next week when it gets super complicated), maybe a blog. Something in the entertainment sector, we have a few in that space, and I'm told people pay money for all kinds of crazy stuff over there - look at the Kardashians.

We'll pick a site early next week and start putting the rubber to the road in terms of getting it setup and some content on there to see if we can build a bit of traffic and get the dollar meter ticking over.