One recent trend to offset these losses is to develop mini-sites. This option is more viable than ever as more servers such as HostGator offer unlimited domains and incredible bandwidth. These are then monetized to at least recoup yearly expenditures until the domainer can find a buyer. In fact, your readers that develop and flip sites might like to know that I have seen the more industrious types offering the development of these sites for other domainers. If you take a look at contentminisites.com you can see one of the more professional sites that offer this service. No, I don’t work for them. I checked it out to see if my own site model was in line with everyone else.

Some domainers take a short, mid, and long-term approach to the sites by quickly selling off those that make little money and continuing to develop the more lucrative domains/sites to hold as part of their portfolio since of course the older sites do have more value.

The only real differences I’ve seen between domainers that are developing these mini-sites and site-flippers is that, while both do keyword research on the sites for the domain, those whose primary objective is the acquisition of the domain will go on to try and get some sort of professional estimate of the value of the domain itself before making a purchase but are less inclined to create full-blown sites with hundreds of pages unless they see a marked increase in revenue and/or traffic over the first 90 days of ownership.

Me? I’m still building backlinks on my first sites! LOL!

In terms of monetizing…I’ve had success using a variety of methods on the one site, I think it really depends on what the long term plans are for a site as to how it’s best monetized.

I’m not sure how much cross over there has traditionally been between domainers and site flippers, but I know there has been some recent hype around buying old domains with page rank to build sites on to sell. It’s certainly one way of leveraging a domain but as with any site purchase, buyers should do their due diligence on the links that point to those domains.

My original intent was to just sell the domain name which is in the fitness niche and so I took a lesson from realtors and created the site as if it were “staged” – putting up a bare-bones site which includes original, keyword rich content, clean code, a simple banner and css navigation, and one graphic per page. I then put in some suitable Amazon products and Google AdSense.

Thinking of the way I’ve been following domain sales, the first thing I usually do is type it into my browser just to see what’s there. Following that idea, I wanted to give the potential buyers an idea of what could be done with the domain in more general terms instead of targeting a specific model and I consider the site a throw-in bonus. However, it’s been my experience that when it comes to true monetizing, I would be better off picking my poison so that visitors aren’t being tossed all over the page and I’m not thrown in different directions trying to bring in traffic.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Am I correct in thinking that it’s at about this point where the domainers finish up and the site flippers continue on?

How are you monetizing your sites? Are you following a specific model? For example, optimized for AdSense or niche blogging or list building?

I had to smile when I read that you plan your sites to at least recover start-up costs as I am still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I’ll be seeing any earnings at all

My rule of thumb is to give a new site an excellent start by publishing useful keyword rich articles. Not every site will sell and therefore I’ve never wanted to feel ‘stuck’ with an unsold site. If it’s built on solid foundations then it’s off to a running start to attract traffic and earnings that will help recover costs to-date and increase the chances of a sale in a future auction.

You’re asking the right questions and I’m always happy to help so any areas of uncertainty feel free to ask away.

I had a question about content. As you know from my comments on previous posts, I have not tried this business model yet but I have just started building a portfolio of domains.

As I recently worked through this process the first time, instead of parking the domain, I created a 5 page mini-site to monetize it and wound up writing about 2,200 words one afternoon, so now it’s easier for me to see how this model can lead to site flipping.

The question I have is specific to content. I know a general rule of thumb for most blog posts is to keep them between 250 – 400 words. Do you hold to this advice when creating your sites and if not, have you noticed any correlation between content length when compared to the number of sales and/or final sales price?