A special month for me since I have get back all my investments since I started buying expired domains back in January 2012. If you have invested in stocks, properties, bonds or other traditional investments, would you be able to get back all your capital in just 5 months?
How about getting almost 200% ROI in the 6th month? Yeah, the reason why this income report came in so late is because I sold two of my websites for a lump sum which I will be investing in buying higher quality expired domains.
One important lesson I learned this month is that one of my profitable site has been penalized by Google for having duplicate content. I have since saw a huge lost of traffic and of course a loss of adsense income. I will be changing all the content on the site so that it will have only unique content (will checked against copyscape) and hopefully Google will remove the penalty and ranked that website back to first page.
Here’s the income report for May 2012:
Total investments for May 2012: $0
Total income for May 2012: $379.67
Nett income for May 2012: $379.67
Total investments to date: $1,004.67
Total income to date: $1,170.74
Nett income to date: +$166.07
Stay tuned to my next month income report, I will show you how I achieved 200% ROI in just 6 months!
The internet marketing world was greeted with a sudden awakening on April 24th when around 3% of all the websites were dropped liked a ton of brick in the Google SERP. This is the latest Google update codenamed “Penguin”. Liked what happened in the very first panda update, many internet marketers were frustrated when they see their income vanish overnight.
If some of you are affected, I’m sorry to learn about that as I have experienced such disaster before, website getting dropped from Google search rankings or even worse, website get completely de-listed! Many industry experts believe that Google is now cracking hard on those blog networks which artificially boost up website rankings, after the famous BMR (Build My Rank) network of blogs were de-indexed and the service have to be closed down.
Without much delay, Google penalized websites which employ these paid backlink services and also crack down on those sites which are “over-optimized” on both onsite and offsite. To put it simply, if you have been doing hundreds of unatural backlinks with the same anchor text pointing to your website homepage, your site will likely be affected by the “Penguin” update.
Some of my niche websites are also affected and there’s nothing much I could do. However, if you have been following this blog since January this year, you will have know that I have started investing in expired domains which have keyword phrases already ranking in Google without me building a single link.
And because all of these expired domains have a long history of at least 5 years, many of their backlinks are natural and Google likes them. This fact is proven as I saw an increase in traffic in all of my expired domain sites after the 24th April, which I think my sites are pushed up the SERP rankings because many newer niche sites are penalized. My guess is that Google will favor aged domains with natural backlinks even more and therefore I’m probably on the right track.
And now for the income report. For the month of April, I bought 2 expired domains (Site #8 & #9) costing a total of $89 from Godaddy and Namejet. As of now, both are not generating income yet but I hope the money will start rolling in next month.
Some of the sites that I bought in January is generating between $70 and over $100 now and I may want to sell them so that I can raise more money to buy higher quality expired domains.
Total investments for April 2012: $89
Total income for April 2012: $251.05
Nett income for April 2012: $162.05
Total investments to date: $1,004.67
Total income to date: $791.07
Nett income to date: -$213.60
If you have been affected by Google Penguin, I will like to hear how badly you have been hit and what’s your future plans for making money online.
This is an exciting month to report my income based on the expired domains since I invested in January 2012. Most of the expired domains I bought have already generated 100% ROI, and they are still giving me cash in my pocket as the day passes.
The main reason why I delayed writing this income report is because I was having a short holiday in Malaysia in the first week of April, travelling to Port Dickson, Genting Highlands, Kuala Lumpur (KL), Batu Pahat (durian farm) and back to Singapore. What surprised me was that during this trip, my websites developed from expired domains continue to generate income for me even when I’m doing nothing on my websites. In fact, one of the website I invested have generated 2 affiliate sales with commission over $200!
It’s a nice feeling to be able generate cash while travelling. Although this is small money, I believe as I continue to invest more money in expired domains, I should be able to generate a nice chunk of passive income.
For the month of March, I invested in 2 expired domains, let’s called it Site #6 and Site #7. As usual, site #7 has regained rankings to first page, position #2 of Google SERP, although it has not achieve any clicks yet. I’m quite confident that site #7 will be paid for itself soon since the average CPC for it’s main keyword is over $8 a click!
However, for site #6, it is still stuck at page 2 of the SERP probably because it was initially ranked on page 1 (before domain expired) due to Google places listing, and not by the organic listing. I guess this is the mistake I made since semrush report also indicate that all of keywords ranking for site #6 on page 1 is due to Google places listing. This has certainly taught me the lesson that I should never buy an expired domain based on keywords that are ranked solely by Google places listing.
Total investments for March 2012: $138
Total income for March 2012: $398.15
Nett income for March 2012: $260.15
March 2012 Adsense Income
March 2012 EAN Income
Total investments to date: $915.67
Total income to date: $540.02
Nett income to date: -$375.65
If you have any comments, feel free to leave them below.
I have spotted a high PR domain which is available for sale through private auction at Namejet.com. The expired domain that I going to analyze is Nystreasury.com which has a PR5 Google page rank. This will be a good domain to be developed into a full website for the purpose of building high PR links to other credit/financial/tax related websites that you want to rank on Google search engine.
1. Keywords ranking on Google
The keyword phrase “nys dept of taxation” is ranking at #7, “nys department of taxation” at #9 and “new york state department of taxation” at #10; which are good since you can get some traffic from people who type in these keyword phrases.
2. Cost per click (CPC) of the keywords
Semrush values Nystreasury.com at $1,900. However, since there are no advertisers for the top keyword phrases, this valuation does not stand if you use the domain for making money through Google Adsense.
3. Google ads competition
Poor. There is no advertisers buying the keyword phrases thus making the expired domain not viable for running Adsense ads.
4. No. of exact match searches per month
“nys dept of taxation” – 4,400
“nys department of taxation” – 3,600
“new york state department of taxation” – 2,900
5. Compete.com traffic
According to compete.com, this domain achieve a peak of 818 unique visitors in June and 157 in Sept 2011 before dropping to zero in the following months.
6. History of the domain (website) before it expires.
This domain also have content since 2000 and the entire website talks about taxation and finance for the New York State.
If you have any questions or comments, please post them below.
In this video, I share the criteria how I determine whether an expired domain name like Wineandliquorcourier.com is valuable based on the factors below:
1. Keywords ranking on Google
The keyword phrase “paul mason” is ranking at #6 position in Google with
an exact match monthly search volume of 2,400 which is good but CPC is only $0.10 and there is zero advertiser! This makes it less attractive for making money off Google Adsense.
The domain is also ranked for “asti champagne” (#2 at $0.54/click) and “asti spumante champagne ” (#3 at $0.56/click), however both keywords have little advertisers since Google Ads competition ranges from 0.08 to 0.24.
2. Cost per click (CPC) of the keywords
Semrush values the domain at $1,589 worth of Google traffic per month. But it is over valued since most of the keyword phrases have little or no advertisers.
3. Google ads competition
Poor. Ranges from 0 – 0.24, makes it not viable from running adsense.
According to compete.com, this domain achieve a peak of 2,177 in June 2011 showing that there is evidence of site visitors present
6. History of the domain (website) before it expires.
This domain also have content since 2003 and the entire website talks about wine and liquor courier service.
After the analysis using semrush, I found that this domain is not suitable for making money by just putting adsense ads simply because the Google ads competition are too low. However, if you are already operating a wine and liquor business, then you can make use of the traffic from this expired domains to increase your sales.
In this video, I will be showing you the premium domain name Social.org which is currently going for auction sale at Namejet.com. As you can see, with still a week to go, there are already 314 bids with the top bid reaching $3,700. This is probably due to the fact that Facebook is going for it’s IPO this year and expected to raise $5 billion.
Now if you also want to buy this domain name social.org for investment purposes, it is important to know how professional domainers value this exclusive domain name. In this video, I will be using the “Rosener Equation” which is discussed in detailed on a blog post by Michael Cyger from domainsherpa.com
The Rosener equation will be using 4 parameters to access a premium domain name:
Local month search volume (US traffic) with exact search match
Google Adwords CPC (Cost Per Click)
Based on #1 Google Position, 35% traffic
12 Months To Recoup Investment
To get the valuation of Social.org, you will need to multiple all the 4 parameters. Based on my research, here’s the parameters:
22,200 (search volume) x $2.05 (CPC) x 35% x 12 mths = $189,420
However, this calculation applies to a .COM domain, so in our case, we need to give this valuation some discount. Also, if you are a domainer who just want to hold on to the domain in the hope that the value will appreciate in a couple of years, your fair value is only 10% of the valuation price above.
If you are going to build a business based on the domain social.org, than this could be a fair price (after some discount for a .ORG domain). If you have any other valuation mthods, feel free to share with our readers here.
Although this is a rather short month, but as I start watching cash flowing into my pocket, I can’t help feeling excited. This would not have happen have I built a website from scratch. However, I also discover some mistakes when evaluating an expired domain.
I found that even though an expired domain may be ranking previously for a keyword that has high CPC, it doesn’t mean that Google will pay you based on that. The most important thing is that you must make sure that there are advertiser paying money for that exact keyword, otherwise Google will pay you pennies. A simple way to check this is to type that keyword phrase that the expired domain has ranked in the past into Google search engine and check if there is any advertiser.
It ‘s a painful mistake since 2 of the expired domains I invested last month do not have a single advertiser bidding for any of their keyword!
This month, I invested in another 2 expired domains where one of them costs only $25! I have a feeling that that domain will be a goldmine since it has over 33,000 exact match local monthly search and over $6 a click, and yes, there are tons of advertisers paying money for this exact keyword.
This is the first month that I focus all my efforts into investing in expired domains so I don’t really expect much income coming in. Fortunately, I acquired 3 expired domains where 2 of them have the potential of becoming authority websites. All have PR rankings from 2-4 and have solid content.
The bidding process was tiring since I have to wake up at 5am (Singapore time) to bid with others. Only 1 domain did not go into the bidding process.
Total investments for January 2012: $541
Total income for January 2012: $29.93
Hopefully, I will recover all my investments in the next few months
Just recently, I spotted the 4-letter domain name Ship.net for sale at the Namejet aftermarket services website. While I have no intention to buy the domain, I offered my shameless bid at $69 to see how much price this rare premium domain name would fetch.
I would update the final price here in 2 days time. The auction starts with 205 bidders with bid price ranging from $69 to over $1,200 as the starting bid. Needless to say, this will probably be one of the fiecerly contested domain names in recently months.
As seen in the video, the ex owner of Ship.net is Oliver Hoger, which is a prominent domain investor that specializes in .NET and high quality names like police.net and toilet.net; he would dthen evelop them into a full website and flip for a lump sum. This strategy is similar to what I teach in the FREE video training course, except of course the domains I invest costs only a few hundred bucks and all of them comes with instant traffic which anyone can convert them into cash in their pocket.
I do not know why Oliver wants to let ship.net expires…. anyway, over at Sedo.com, this domain is listed for sale at 18,000 EUR with already 2 bidders. Other than the fact that ship.net has a high potential value, the new owner would have to spend quite a long period to develop the site as it contains zero backlinks, unless of course he wants to buy it for branding purposes.
For those who are interested, ship.net can be valued in this way:
Exact local monthly search x Google CPC x 35% (click through rate for #1 Ranking) x 12 months
This will give: 18,000 x 3.3 x 0.35 x 12 = $249,480
However, this valuation is based on the fact that it is a .COM TLD, and domain investor will mostly pay 10% of it’s value ($24,948). If you want to purchase Ship.net, do let me
know since I’m one of the 205 bidders.
Finally, after a price war with 225 bids from 206 bidders, Ship.net is sold for $10,000 and Ships.net sold for $9,999 to the same bidder “hsena” on Feb. 24, 2012 12:29 PM PT through namejet auctions! Based on my valuations above, it’s a huge discount! Let’s wait and see if the bidder decides to develop the domains or simply just park it.
