Archive for August, 2010

Domain Name For Sale – Flipping A Website

One of the easy, and potentially profitable, ways to make money online is by ‘flipping’ websites. This concept is the same as when an investor will buy a house, fix it up and turn around and sell it for a profit, the only difference is that you are doing it all in the virtual world, online. You will first find a domain name for sale, purchase it, put up a simple website and sit back and wait for a few weeks or months, then sell your website for a nice little profit.

While this is a fairly easy concept there is, of course, a little more to it. The first thing you want to do is purchase a desirable domain name. It’s unlikely that if you buy the domain name ‘Jim Smith’ you’re going to get many people who would want to pay for it later.

When deciding on the domain name you want to buy you should do some research to find a hot niche that has a lot of interest in it. It could be anything from cat toys to coffee makers. When you find a niche that not only has a lot of traffic but where people are actually making purchases then you need to do some keyword research to determine which specific words and phrases people are using when they search for products in that niche.

For example, if your niche is cat toys you will need a list of words and phrases that people are searching for… a lot. So after your keyword research you might find that one phrase that has a lot of searches is: catnip cat toys. The next thing you have to do is to go to one of the online domain name sellers such as GoDaddy.com or NameCheap.com and see if you can get that exact phrase as a domain name. If you can get CatnipCatToys.com than you are well on your way, you know that your domain name will get a lot of free traffic because it is a popular keyword phrase that gets a lot of traffic.

Once you’ve got your domain name, you need to put up a website. This can be a simple blog style. Add some content and sit back and wait, or you can be a little more proactive and help your site grow more quickly by adding more content more frequently and also by doing some article marketing to get even more traffic. It’s up to you which way you choose to go, one will be easier but take longer and the other will be harder but get results more quickly.

Now that you’ve got a desirable domain name in a popular niche and your site is getting traffic, you can sell it and (hopefully) make a profit. There are several sites online that will walk you through the steps and list your site for sale, one of the best known is Flippa.com. It costs around $20 to list your site for sale, and of course, there is no guarantee that it will sell but if you’ve followed these steps you’ve got a good chance of selling your site and making several hundred dollars and it all starts with picking the right domain name for sale.

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Buy Domain Names – 3 Tips To Help You

There’s a belief that you can never really lose money if you invest (wisely) in real estate. As the saying goes “they’re never going to make more land”. When it comes to the internet, having domain names is owning online real estate and that’s why despite all the free resources online you should buy domain names… as many as you can.

But, just like real estate, not all domain names are going to be equally valued, some will be worth more than others. To pick out a good domain name, which will enhance not only your business but how much you could sell the website for down the road, is something of a science. There are a few elements you should consider when you buy your domain name:

1. The first thing you need to do is to identify the niche your new website will be in. What product or service will you be promoting? Once you’ve figured that out you should do keyword research to find a list of great keywords that get a lot of searches every month. Those keywords should be the domain name. For example, if my site was on dog grooming and I found a great keyword: dog grooming clippers. Than I would try to get a domain name something like: dog grooming clippers.com.

This is a great way to get a lot of traffic to your website for free. Why? Because you already know from your keyword research that the term dog grooming clippers gets a lot of monthly searches, so many of those searches will be sent right to your website since that is the domain name. This one step can help you get a lot more targeted visitors for free.

2. There are a lot of places online where you can buy domain names. GoDaddy, NameCheap are two of the most common, and one’s I’ve personally used, but now I only use NameCheap. If you want to find more just visit some internet marketing forums and ask for opinions, or do a search. Domain names are inexpensive usually around $10 a year at the most.

3. There is a lot of conflicting opinions about whether or not you should get any domain with a different extension such as .net or .org for example. Personally, I will use a .com, .net or .org. I’ve found that any of them work very well for my needs and .net are quite cheap. You’ll have to find what works best for you, but you need to remember something: many people will say that customers will forget a long URL or a different extension, which is true, but how do you target the majority of your customers?

If you aren’t handing out business cards and expecting them to type in the domain name than it’s not such a big issue. Most of the traffic I get is either from searches or from online marketing and in all cases my website visitors just have to click on a link which is why I think having different extensions hasn’t had a negative impact on my business.

Take the time to establish your internet presence, don’t get fooled into thinking that going the ‘free’ route with a blog is the best way to go. If you don’t buy domain names and rely solely on the free services you don’t actually own your fair share of internet real estate and you don’t present a professional image.

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Free Web Site Traffic Sources

One of the definite advantages to internet marketing is the availability of so many free web site traffic sources. There are literally hundreds you can choose from to suit your business and website, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, EzineArticles, Squidoo, USFreeAds, Craigslist, traffic exchanges, safelists, and more. This article will speak about a lesser known way to generate free web site traffic: writing newsletter articles.

While all the free methods of getting traffic to your website work very well, they can take quite a bit of time and consistency in your efforts before you start seeing the rewards. However you can get a so-called jump start on your efforts by writing newsletter articles. If you’ve done article marketing, you already have the know-how to do newsletter articles. The only difference is where you submit them. The hardest part of the whole process is finding someone who will publish your articles. And it’s really not hard, just a little time consuming. However, the results are immediate.

Here’s how it works. Editors of newsletters always need good content, especially if their newsletter is published frequently. So, some of them will allow you to publish your article for free, in exchange for offering them the work. The key is to make sure that your article is well-written and offers valuable information. And then, the key to getting traffic to your website is to offer compelling information in the resource box at the end of the article, with a brief description of you and/or what you offer, and the link to your site.

After you’ve decided the topic of your article, as it relates to your website of course, then you need to look for newsletters in your niche. In order to get the greatest burst of visitors, find at least 10 newsletters (better 20), that will accept free newsletters. Find out how many subscribers each newsletter has–in general, the most successful and important ones will publish this information. Send your article to the one with the highest number of subscribers first and continue down the list. BUT make sure that you wait a couple of days in between each submission so that you avoid having the same article published by different newsletters on the same day, causing embarrassment to them and possible denial of any future articles from you.

When you’ve finished sending the article to all the newsletters on your list, then send it to lists (such as IdeaMarketers.com, for example) that hold articles that other newsletters can send to their subscribers. Remember that the key to getting the best results with this in terms of free web site traffic is to write good content. You don’t have to be a professional writer but your article should be free of grammatical and spelling errors, and perhaps more importantly, offer valuable information that answers the questions or solves the problems of your target readers.

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Domains For Sale – Ins and Outs

When starting an online business there are many ways you can go about it. You can buy your own domain, from scratch, or you can get domains for sale that already have a website and traffic built in. If you choose the later option, it’s important to do your homework so you don’t overpay for the website.

Just like in the ‘real world’ you can make money flipping websites. People do it all the time. If you want to profit from someone else’s work, you only have to look as far as the nearest website auction site such as GoDaddy.com or Flippa.com. There you will find a list of websites that someone else has taken the time to build and grow and hopefully has a steady stream of traffic and has made money from it.

Now you may ask yourself, if this person is making money with their site why would they sell it? The reason it that this is the way a lot of people actually make money online, they make more from selling the site than they would by keeping it. Or, they just don’t want to hold on to a particular site, or they want to make some quick cash. If you do your due diligence you can pick up a great niche site, with decent traffic and maybe even some good links for very little money. And the best part is that it is turn key. You don’t have to do much since it’s already set up and profitable.

It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and overpay for a site, but if you do that than it will take you longer to be profitable, or you might just get taken completely and never make money from a certain site. To be sure you don’t do this it’s important that you verify all income claims the person is making about their site. At a minimum they should provide you with screen shots showing their traffic counts, and their monetization efforts.

Many of the bigger flipping sites will have fairly strict guidelines that need to be followed by anyone who is listing a website for sale, these can help protect you but ultimately you are responsible for protecting yourself.

Take some time to do your own research into the niche that the website is centered around. How many products are for sale in this niche? Go to Amazon.com and do a search for the precise niche items to see how popular they are. Check to see how many customer reviews each product has (this will give you an idea of how passionate the people in this niche are about the product, more reviews typically means more passion, and more sales).

Go to the website yourself, look around. What is your first reaction to the site? All of these things will help protect you from making a bad purchase. Most sites that sell websites will have fairly extensive training materials to walk you through the process, I highly recommend that you take some time to check them out first, that is step one when trying to find great, profitable domains for sale.

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Infuse New Ideas To Increase Online Traffic To Your Website

Without a reasonable online traffic visiting your website, you can just say that you, like most businesses, have a website that does not contribute in any way to your business. Your website may be a good one because you may have spent days and months for designing and building it but all these efforts are futile without visitors. You need not feel bad about it and become a hostage to the devil of inertia. You should move forward, rethink your strategies and infuse new ideas to correct the situation.

The main thing to do to drive more customers to your website is to improve its contents. The contents must give valuable and quality information to the customers but you should also ensure that the customers are motivated to visit your site repeatedly. You can achieve this only if your content is interesting also. Your description of the product on your website should offer solutions to customers.

You should also keep in mind that you modify and improve the contents frequently. Customers should long and yearn to visit your website for the sake of its contents and for the information and solutions for their problems. Such an interest can be created in customers only if you update your knowledge on your niche on a continuous basis. Continuous research is taking place in one part of the world or the other and all these innovations are made available to you with the help of the Internet. You can make use of it to the optimum for giving updated information to your customers.

You can also plan to create a free newsletter for the visitors of your website. This should be a participative newsletter where customers can also contribute their articles, write to you about their opinions and suggest improvements. The crux of the matter is to popularize your website so that more and more online traffic visits your website.

You should also focus on using the keywords optimally. Customers use keywords to search the Internet for the products and services they need. Only if your keywords match theirs, they will be able to locate your website on the search engine results and visit your website. There is a powerful tool called Search Engine Optimization that can be used for finding out the best and most popular keywords that are searched by customers. You should use these keywords on your website.

In the same fashion, if you write articles and blogs of your niche and post them on the various free blogging sites and on article directories, using the popular keywords effectively in the blogs and articles, you can drive more and more traffic to your website. But you should not forget to link your website to these blogs and articles.

You can popularize your website using the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you make it a point to update these accounts regularly on a daily basis, you are sure to find like-minded people on them who may ultimately become your customers.

You should be patient when you implement all these strategies. Rome was not built in a day. If you keep on using these strategies on a consistent basis, you are sure to get a very good online traffic to your website soon.

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