Choosing Domains For Your 90 Day Flip
Putting A Plan In Place For Your 90 Day Flip
Today I want to talk to you about the end game.
The best way to get the most out of renovating aged domains is to actually have a plan in place.
The reason for having a plan is that there are aged domains that are perfect for renovating and others that make it a little harder. Sure, any aged domain can be renovated and sold for profit, but with a little planning you can make it all happen with a lot less effort. In fact there a couple of tools that I’ll show you that make it very easy.
The key to fetching the highest price possible when it comes time to sell your sites is income. If you have a look at the just sold section on Flippa.com, you will see that the sites that sell for over $1,000 all tend to be making money. It doesn’t have to be much either, but income makes a huge difference.
We’ll go through the process of buying and renovating aged domains in the next few posts, but today I want to work backwards to show you how to move forwards. No, I’m not going to teach you Michael Jackson’s moon walk, but show you why certain aged domains work best for what we’re trying to do.
The key to maximising profits when it comes time to sell and one of the easiest things to get wrong with aged domains is keeping PR. It doesn’t take much to lose the PR that comes with your aged domain, so it’s crucial that you do all it takes to keep it and hopefully increase it.
Playing the PR game with google is in an interesting one. They make the rules, but don’t fully explain how they work.
The stats that google release about your site are anywhere up to 3 months old and not a true indication of where a site sits in real time, so there is never an accurate way to tell where your aged domain’s current PR really sits when you buy it, or what will happen to it when the next update cycle kicks in.
That part of the game is a roll of the dice, but it works both ways. Your newly acquired aged domain’s PR could move in either direction or even stay the same in the next google update. I’ve had PR3 domains drop to PR1 and I’ve had PR2 domains move up to PR4. You just don’t know where in the cycle the domain is at the time you acquire it. Google keep their cards close to their chests with stats. More often than not it’s not a huge shift either way, if there is an movement at all.
The good news is that you can preserve and even increase the PR of your aged domains.
How do you do all this?
The same way you do with any other site. Great regular content and quality backlinks. I wish there was a quicker and easier way, but the rules that apply to regular sites, also apply to sites you build on aged domains. Sure, you can venture down the grey/black hat road and get some great results fast, but what then? How do you sell a site with all the sneaky cloak and dagger techniques attached to it?
When creating sites to sell built on aged domains, you need to make them as organic as apples with worms and spots on them.
If you have a number of sites on the go at once, adding content regularly to all your sites becomes a challenge and some help is needed. There are two resources that I use for adding content and once set up correctly they pretty much run on their own.
You know how I mentioned earlier that some aged domains lend themselves better to renovating than others? This is how it works. If you’re looking for keyword relevant content to feed your site the easiest way to find it is to start with keywords that lots of people create lots of content for.
As an example, recently I bought an aged domain, with a PR of 3 and a few hundred backlinks in the pregnancy niche. Finding content for the site was easy as it’s a popular niche.
The two main sources of content I use to feed my sites are WordPress Direct and Article Marketing Automation. I use WordPress Direct, which is basically a word press manager on steroids. It’s the fastest way I known to setup and manage a word press blog. It also comes with great content posting software included and setting it all up is a breeze.
Article Marketing Automation does a few things, but what we are interested in is the article submission feature where you basically select niche categories that relate to your website and the system regularly feeds your site with unique spun articles and this part of their service is free. If you’re not familiar with article spinning, it’s a way of writing and formatting articles in such a way that every time it is published, a unique version of the article is created. I’ve had sites increase PR purely on the back of feeding keyword rich articles from AMA. This is why it works best with aged domains that use popular keywords. It’s hard to find spun content on more obscure topics.
Now, that you have an idea of why targeting certain markets works best for renovating aged domains, we’ll have a look at how to find and buy aged domains in the next post and I’ll show you how I avoid getting into bidding wars when winning domains at auctions.
cheers
Danny
Is It Time To Get A .co ?
Turn $10 To $1500 In Just 90 Days
Less than a year ago, I was a drummer in rock band struggling to make ends meet when I chanced upon Ed Dale’s Challenge, looking for ways to market my band via the internet. Forward to today and now I’m a little ahead of struggling to make ends meet and I’ve managed to sell over 100 websites online in a little over six months.
That’s not the lucky part. It took a ton of work and very little sleep to make all that happen. The lucky part comes a little later.
I’ll throw in a disclaimer here, just so I don’t start getting hate mail. Not every site I build sells for $1,500 (who would have guessed that the latex rubber doll market would fall through) nor does every domain I buy cost $10, but a lot do.
If you’re not familiar with the Challenge, in a very small nutshell it’s a free course that shows you how to make your first dollar online. In a slightly larger nutshell, it’s the most successful internet market teaching resource ever made available.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, buying an aged domain is the easy part. It’s what you do with it that makes you money. If you want to use the successful strategy of building a website on the domain, you will have to get good at building and managing websites.
I knew nothing when it came to internet marketing, other than most of the teachers were frustrated, and some even frustrating, guitarists. Well that was it for me. If a guitarist could do this stuff, then a drummer was a sure thing. You see, unlike guitarists, drummers actually listen to what’s going on around them. So I listened and I learned. The course teaches how to research, build and run a niche website from scratch and make your first online dollar. And I did. In fact, I made $3.27, which is about the going rate for most unsigned bands playing at your local bar on that much coveted Tuesday night spot.
On the final day of the challenge, and almost as an after-thought, Ed mentioned about selling any of our no longer loved sites on this new auction site ‘Flippa.com’. I had been working at dominating the micro niche “How to Play a Ludwig Snare Drum”, and seeing as the rent was due two days ago, I thought “why not?” I listed my site the next day and within the hour it sold… for a few hundred bucks.
Now, here comes the lucky part:
I was there selling websites on Flippa right at the beginning of an arbitrage opportunity and I milked it. Back then you could by a new domain, throw a wordpress blog on it and sell it for $300 and repeat this as often as you could supply. Like any arbitrage moment, it was going to end and it was a race to supply before demand dried up.
Here’s the next lucky bit:
I attended a seminar earlier this year and heard Kenny Goodman speak for the first time about buying and selling aged and dynamite domains.
That night at the bar at around 2am , where all great ideas start, chatting to Kenny the idea came up that I could merge what I had been doing with aged domains.
You know what, it works like a charm!
I started buying aged domains, with good PR then built a wordpress blog onto them, using wordpress direct, that fastest and most accurate way to setup a wordpress blog. There were a few things I had to learn along the way, such as preserving link networks, understanding 301 redirects, and recreating without copying content. When you buy an aged domain you don’t have any rights to the content that was once on the site, but as long as you can make the pages similar to the previous site, you have every chance of keeping the old links to that page.
Then with a little SEO love, some new content and little time, my $10 aged domain is now a website that will sell for $1,500
The first lesson for me was to learn how to build and manage webistes, so that when a great aged domain came along, I knew what to do with it. The Challange is still the best resource out there, it covers everything and it’s FREE. I recommend you start with the Challenge and I’ll be in touch in the next few days and show you how I find and buy aged domains.
This post was written by Danny Batelic, who runs a popular How to Sell Websites Blog. If you want to learn how to create websites from scratch and sell them online, visit Trading Websites Blog
Domain Fire Sale
GoDaddy Closeouts or ‘fire sales’ are soon-to-expire domain names that didn’t sell at auction. To try and make a
little cash GoDaddy slaps a set, minimum $5 fee on them plus the cost of registration and hopes someone buys them before the expiration date. They’re an online bargain bin for e-property and as with any bargain bin, it’s always worth having a look what’s on offer. When you do, keep in mind that the GoDaddy closeout area can be a veritable Gold mine but it can also be a Graveyard – it all depends what you’re after.
The reason why GoDaddy closeouts are so special is the sheer amount of what’s on offer. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar with in-excess of 28 million domains on its books (Registrar Stats) and as a result it has the largest number of dropped domains as well. These are non-renewed domains that are due to expire and on average around 25,000 domains are added to the closeout section on any given day.
With so many names making it into the GoDaddy closeout area, it’s always worth having a look, whether you have something in mind or not. Usually, a listing will include traffic stats if available (don’t expect many high traffic properties) and there’s often a good selection of generic domain names and even some potential dmoz and yahoo directory listed properties.
You may even find domains with .edu and/or .gov back links; these are rare – but there. The important point here is that whatever goodies a closeout domain has will be passed on to you when you buy it, including:
Link juice
Directory listings
Age
Authority and
PR
Do your homework and get a little lucky and you could see the benefit of someone else’s Internet marketing 
spend.From an SEO perspective, finding a GoDaddy closeout domain is often preferable to buying a new domain or one that has gone completely through the deletion process. When a domain finally expires and is released from a registrar (a process taking about 30 days) all it’s weapons and extras, apart from authority, are taken away and it must start again from fresh. For this reason, grabbing a closeout domain before expiration can give you a head start with any niche-attacking you have in mind.
Whether you find anything suitable for your niche, or to flip, is pot-luck but one thing’s for sure: with the prices so low you’ll have to be quick. Despite no one wanting the domain up to now, you can bet that the one you like has a fair few contenders for ownership. One of the best ways to get a head start on new GoDaddy closeout domains is to subscribe to the official twitter account for Go Daddy Auctions, where you’ll get tweets of newly added domains.
FYI: you’ll get auction properties through this as well; so make sure you know it’s a closeout before you get excited. Once you’ve found a domain you like, bear in mind there are discounts for bulk purchases
so it might be worth getting all the properties you’re drawn to in one go. But don’t get carried away, stick to the usual drill, research and double-check everything: domain name age, PR, back links etc then make the decision. Ready to play?… GoDaddy Closeouts are now in the DomainFace database.
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