Domain Development	1.3/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin April 25, 2008

Development of domains opens up a whole variety of opportunities.

Advantages

• Greater potential profit
• Greater sale price

Disadvantages

• May require considerable time and resources to develop
• May require time and resources to maintain

Barriers to development

Skills needed to develop and maintain

Website development can be done these days with minimal knowledge. Scripts and Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others can be used to easily create and manage a site.

If that is not something you wish to do, you can hire website designers to build basic sites for you. The investment up front usually pays off if you have a decent business plan.

Too many domains - which to do first?

A domainer may be getting nice passive income from some good parked domains and be reluctant to develop for fear of putting that income at risk. This is certainly a legitimate fear. I often start from the other end of the spectrum, developing domains that are making low or marginal profits and thus maximizing the income of my portfolio.

Time and resources

Development does take time and resources but a lot can be delegated. By using a CMS, management is similar to using any text editor software. Content writing can be outsourced to independent writers or even for small amounts of money to college students. You can maintain multiple websites from one code-base using a CMS such as I describe for WordPress in my e-book (shameless plug!).

Domain Development Strategies

Lets start with mini-sites. A lot of the principles can be applied to other development strategies so for other strategies, I will only include what is extra or specific to that strategy. Take this mini-site description as the baseline development principle.

Mini-sites

These are simple sites that are similar to parked domain pages but with several of them and with more content. You may have anywhere from a couple of pages to 5 to 10 pages. These are useful for domains where there are different meanings to the domain name so you can create pages for each of these meanings or where a variety of possible information is being looked for.

International calling mini-site example

Take for instance the example of an mini-site about international phone calls to a certain country. The visitor is likely going to be looking for international dialing codes for that country including country codes and city codes. Related information might also be useful such as time difference, major holidays etc.

Related ads

Of course the goal is to make money so you need to include related ads. The most obvious are ads promoting cheaper calling plans. Think more about the visitor and you will realise they may be ex-pats and travel back to their home country so ads for cheap flights will most likely be of interest to them. Ads for country specific information such as news publications, local or hard to get products and so on will also be potential money makers.

Evergreen content

You will want to keep the content “evergreen” if possible. “Evergreen” content is content that does not become quickly outdated. A news story about a current event rarely holds interest for long and a new story is needed to encourage new visitors. On the other hand evergreen content is always useful. The example in this case would be information on dialing codes. They rarely change and are always needed.

 Optimizing ads

You can use contextual ads on mini-sites. Make sure you have sufficient theme-related content to ensure that the contextual ads are correctly targeted. Experiment with layout and positioning of ads. You can follow the Google adsense heat map as a starting point but every web page can be different.

You can also use affiliate ads such as Amazon or Commission Junction. This will require some work to pick the best programs for your website and to see which ad formats work best. Always keep your visitor in mind when choosing the ads.

Follow the terms of service

Always follow the terms of service (TOS) of the advertising program to avoid being penalised or banned from those programs. For instance, Adsense requires that you do not use more than 3 adsense blocks per page. Some Adsense themes for scripts or CMS programs come with more than three and could cause you to violate the Adsense TOS.

Key questions to ask about your visitors

Ask yourself

• Why are they here?
• What do they need?
• What related information might be of interest?
• What are their likely habits, behaviors, interests?

 Summary

The key points for mini-sites are

• Keep the design simple
• Use evergreen content
• Target your visitor
• Experiment and optimize your ads

I will go over some more basics and cover some more strategies next time.

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