To help us get started and rolling along on the blog post content flow, I’ve decided to reprint (and update as needed) a number of my old-but-the-info-and-tips-are-still-good posts on Wordpreneur. Hope you find them useful!

I collect websites.

Actually, I don’t, but considering how practically inexpensive a dot-com domain name costs nowadays and budget website hosting being so gosh-darned cheap, it’s no wonder that whenever folks look at my “portfolio” of Web properties, they think that’s what I do: collect websites.

Nope. If there’s anything I could be accused of “collecting,” it’d be dot-com domains. When a good name comes to me and it’s available, off I go to GoDaddy and register it… even if I don’t need it now, or maybe ever.

Some domains that are closely tied in with my interests I develop into full sites. Others get tied in with other work projects. But they don’t all get put to work. Since we’re talking good names (no sense in registering crappy ones ahead of time; you can get those anytime you want), at some point if I conclude that I really won’t have a need for a domain, I sell it for a very nice profit (they only cost about $10 to register, so doubling your money is dirt easy… and you betcha you can do better than that). So no worries.

But what about the dormant ones? The ones I keep but haven’t put to work doing anything yet?

Well, by default, GoDaddy and other domain registrars route any traffic that go to those dot-coms to some generic “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon”-type webpage which has been populated with advertisements. You’ve seen those pages, I’m sure. Benefit to the domain owner? Absolutely none.

A very easy way to fix that would be to have the domain’s traffic redirected to one of your actual sites. Much better than the default thing above, but still a big waste, I think. Unless you’ve got an extraordinarily splendid domain name that the search engines love or is a natural for serendipitous traffic (i.e., surfer looking for widgets just guesses and types in widgets.com to see what’s there), the amount of traffic this redirection technique generates is negligible.

A much better option: Build a website for the domain, and fill it up with enough related content to make it a somewhat useful destination.

It’s essentially the basic plan I described in The Editor’s Introductory Guide to Blogging Profits, but instead of continuously working and promoting the site and regularly adding content, for the dormant domain site, just:

1. Fill it up with decent content.
2. Organize the content into something sensible (categories).
3. Leave it alone.

If you think about it, it’s somewhat like creating an online book, isn’t it?

The traffic will come from search engines, which is why you want there to be enough content in there to get the SEs minimally interested. And your money will come from Google AdSense clickthroughs.

Cost to you besides time? The 10 bucks for the domain. That’s it.

The assumption is that you’re already paying for hosting that sets no practical limit on how many separate “sites” you can set up and run on a single account (like what I have with my Site5 hosting account), so the $7-10 a month you pay for that kind of budget hosting is essentially a fixed cost that you’re paying anyway, so that doesn’t enter the equation.

More important question: How much money will it bring in? Assuming you’ve got your AdSense ads set up and placed properly, these sites will bring in about $5-20 a month on average.

Big whoop, I know. But consider this: You’ll need a good amount of content for this to work — I estimate about 25-40 decent articles will do the trick, depending on the subject and the articles you find — and you’ll want to be equipped with the right development tools (like WordPress or other blog/content management software platforms — many of which Site5 and other hosts provide at no extra cost, by the way); with that, it shouldn’t take a good editor more than a nice short evening to do the whole site, start to finish. Less, really, since actually, I wouldn’t even bother editing the stuff, just some minor proofing to clean things up a bit (it’s not like you’ll want this on your resume or portfolio). So worst case, let’s say an evening.

That’s one night… generating $5-20 a month… month after month after month.

You’ve got more than 100 nights in the year, don’t you? Now how many separate sites making $5-20 per month does that add up to? I’m guessing that doing the math suddenly just got a bit more interesting.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• GoDaddy
• Site5