If you recall, many months ago I posted a Domain into Dollars Review on this website, which I believe is an excellent method of finding names that have good “type in” or “direct navigation” traffic.

I thought it was well and truly time to post you an update, as I have been applying the principles on and off since then.

I hope to answer the question, as to whether the concepts Phil Craig taught then are still relevant today.

“On and Off” means I have been busy doing lots of other things, and it has been very much a part time job, and additionally I have focused on a buy and hold plan (monetizing the domains for monthly income), instead of buying and selling domains.

I’m happy to report that the principles are still working.

I tallied up my parked domains this morning, and I have 70 (yes 70!) domains parked generating an average of $5.25 each per month.

In other words I am averaging about $370 per month in income on those domains in total.

Not exactly a fortune, but then, not chicken feed either.

A domain is costing me around $8.00 to register (with discount coupon) for a years registration.  On average I am generating around $63 back on that original $8 invest, or a Return on Investment of $55 or nearly 8 times the profit!

Yes I am making nearly 8 times my money back on average per domain per year.  That is pretty incredible to me.

If I had really pushed it and had 700 domains instead of 70, I’d be $3700 per month in profit (and likely more than that because I’d be bound to hit a few home runs with some of the domains).

I do wonder why I had no been checking my figures more often during the time.

Now I am using averages  here, because not all domains are making money.

In fact I have 6 domains that I am calling “duds”.  There income ranges from nothing to $0.50c per month, two of the domains have not had a visitor in 2 months.  But the other domains are reasonably consistent.

Since I believe I have approached the buying of domain names diligently according to Phil Craig’s formula, I’d have to say the monetization has worked a treat.  6 “duds” out of 70 is a pretty good return.   I guess you’re not ever going to get a 100% strike rate.

But the other thing I’ve finally got around to doing in the past two months is actually selling some of my domains.

Here is where it really get’s interesting.

Are you ready for this?

I’ve sold 4 domains, pretty well without any effort in the past 2 months, and made a staggering $2165 profit!

On FOUR domains, now let’s look at the figures again.

$8 investment, sold for $540 (each roughly) or a profit of $532 or sixty seven (67) times my original cost back.

This is just mind numbing for me to realise, and I am now actively placing more of my domains for sale.

Maybe I got lucky with the sales of these domains, but are you beginning to see the concept here?  There is high profits here and I have told myself I simply have to find the time to get into this game properly and make more money.

I’ll be posting about Phil’s new product Quick Cash Domaining soon, which I have been lucky enough to have had early access to, be sure to check out the article on my blog here when I post that.   This product is an extension of the original Domains into Dollars product with an important twist.  More on that soon…

I really do think that Phil’s package is a hidden gem, it really does work, and I am proof of it.

So if you’re looking to make some money online, Phil’s Domains into Dollars may be just the ticket.

Whatever you do, at least check it out for yourself.

I did notice that Phil now has an opt-in (enter your email address) before you can access the course.  Do not be too worried about this, just enter your email address when you get to his site and then check out the product for yourself.

While I dislike forced email opt-in’s like this, Phil does not try and promote endless products to you (or even email that often) and you can unsubscribe at any time (I should know I’ve been on his list since I bought Domains into Dollars last year).

Gee I sound like a salesman for his products don’t I?   lol

Phil’s website is at http://www.domains-into-dollars.com

That’s all for now!

Cheers

Tim Buchalka

This is my review for a product called Domains into Dollars – www.domains-into-dollars.com

N.B. – In July 2008, I posted a new review of my updated results after nearly a year of applying Domains into Dollars on this website. Please read the Domains into Dollars Review update by clicking the link to the right of this article below Recent Entries if you are interested.

It came with a solid 194 page Ebook (Profit with the Virtual Real Estate Book Today) and a number of video’s that can be streamed live, or downloaded for later viewing on your computer.

I found the streaming to be slow at times, so bit the bullet and downloaded all the video’s to my compute ad apart from a wierd glitch in one video where the voice goes really slow for about 20 seconds, I found the video’s faultless.

Perhaps I am too cynical because of what seems like hundreds of new products being released weekly hitting my inbox (I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists!), but Domains into Dollars came to my attention from one Internet Marketer only. For that reason I almost missed out on seeing the product, and that would have been nasty.

So what is the product all about?

Simply put Phil Craig, the author seeks to show you how to become a player in the profitable world of domain parking and speculation. He shows you how to become a “Domainer”.

Phil is the right person for the job, he is not an Internet Marketer, but an expert in his field, he has been actively involved as a “Domainer” for 11 years and an attorney and real estate broker for 28 years, so you could say he is a specialist in the field.

Buying and selling domain names is a huge industry, it’s currently a $2 billion dollar (yes billion) and growing. Right now it’s wild, wild west days. Opportunities are abundant, and most people seem to have no idea just how fast it is growing. I certainly didn’t.

Just one example is a guy called Kevin Ham. Probably the most powerful dot com person you’ve never heard of!

He owns around 300,000 domains, and receives around $70Million per annum in revenue from them. His empire is reputed to be worth close to $300 million. All this from owning domain names!

I found it interesting how Phil equated this money backwards like this: -

$70 million is about $5.8 million per month. Divide that by 300,000 domains and it turns out each domain is generating around $19/month in revenue.

Or just $0.63c per day. So $0.63c per day (per domain) is all it takes to get there.

Do you think you can generate $0.63c per day? I certainly think it is achievable.

Phil goes on to show you in detail how money can be made in this game (and there are lots of ways).

The first way is that the smaller domainers people like you and me sell to bigger domainers, if we have a domain name that is popular, we turn around and sell it. This is called domain flipping. You buy a domain for $x and sell it to someone else for $y and make sure $y is a much bigger number than $x !

The other way is pay per click advertising. Not Google Adwords, where you pay for advertising when people click your ads, but rather where you are paid anytime someone clicks an ad on your web site (similar to adsense, but not necessarily adsense).

This is one negative I had with the book and video, as an Internet Marketer who uses Pay per click, it took me a while to realize that he wasn’t talking about adwords, once I got past that I was ok.

The last way is to do what many people do now with domain names, develop them into full scale businesses.

Phil goes into extensive detail to show you how to purchase your domains, how to find traffic from day one without paying anything (no google adwords), and much more.

It turns out that a lot of people type the name of a service they are interested in directly into the address bar of a browser, instead of using the search engine, so if you can find a name that people would use, you will get free traffic.

e.g. if they wanted a limousine in dallas, they might directly type in dallaslimousine.com into the search engine to find it. If they do, it means free traffic to you. Pretty neat huh?

But the best is still to come, Phil then goes on to discuss domain tasting, where he details a legal way to “test” a new domain for web traffic for 5 days, and then getting a refund if your not happy with the results! Definitely an eye opener for me.

Why do you want traffic? Phil shows you how to monetize your web-site using specialist services who take a share of the revenue with you. This means you can be earning money in the first day you test your newly acquired domain!

He actually shows you domain names he has acquired and what the web-site looks like, and the amount of money it is earning each month. Impressive stuff. Remember this is all for testing initially, so if after the 5 days you are not happy with the result, get a refund and move onto the next domain. No cost!

This is a great model if your after passive income, but of course there is no reason why you can’t outright sell your domain, and Phil goes into detail about that, showing you the best ways to attract buyers, the best web-sites to list your domains on, pitfalls to watch out for, and more.

One of the video’s shows you in minute detail how a $6.99 purchase became $515 in less than 7 days. That’s right one domain purchase made over $500 profit in a week. And these sort of results are happening time, and time again.

Of course all this is good, but I wondered if it would work for me. So I took the plunge and purchased a domain (using the specific research tips that Phil shows), and purchased the domain and tested it for traffic. I decided that I would test it for traffic, but also try and sell it at the same time.

My result was that I had not a single hit on the web-site itself, but that I managed to sell my $7.99 purchase for $75. Over the course of a week here are my results.

Purchased domains (total) 10 @ $ 7.99 each $79.99

Revenue in tasting period $4.21
Refunds (3 domains) $23.97

Sale of domains (6) $ 235.40
Selling costs (approx $36)

I kept one domain because it looked like it may end up showing a healthy amount of passive income. Remember I only needed it to be making $0.63c per day…

The figures turned out great for me. I very healthy profit.

I am sure if I spent more time on it, I would have got better results, but it just goes to show you that it really can work.

Phil leaves nothing out, he goes into detail to show you exactly what you need to do, how to do it, and which resources to use.

I was pleased to see that all the resources he recommended did not have affiliate links!

As an attorney, Phil gives you all the legal forms you need when selling domains to cover yourself. He evens gives you a resource to find just deleted domain names. Approximately 40,000 .com names are deleted and put back into the pool each day, this is great opportunity if your quick. I used this service to find some really nice sounding domains, including a few 4 and 5 letter hard to get domain names.

If you want to get into a niche at ground level, virtual real estate is something you should seriously consider. I think Phil has done a great job with this package, and made it very affordable.

I am at the stage now where I am going to focus on this a little more and see just what I can make out of it, I believe there is a huge opportunity there for people getting in at ground level. And being able to “test” means it’s really risk free.

There is a promotion on his web-site at the moment offering $10 off, make sure you click the coupon box at the top of the screen to get the coupon.

Here is the website again Domains into Dollars – www.domains-into-dollars.com

I’d be interested in your comments, drop me a line and tell me what you think. Do you have a product you want reviewed? Drop me a line and I’ll see what can be arranged, and then post a review on this blog.

Cheers

Tim

Newbies guide to grabbing an address on the Internet – Your very own domain name.

As the title of this post suggest, it’s time to discuss domain names. While this may not be of interest to people who have been on the net for a while, or who are already Internet Marketers, it will be of use to people new to the game, so let’s proceed.

Just like your house has a physical address that is unique to you, you need an address on the Internet for people to find you, and for that you need a web site.

Many ISP’s offer a free web site to their customers, and this can be a useful way to get started.

For instance, I used to operate an ISP years ago at www.newave.net.au and all customers were able to specify their own address doe a web site that ultimately was connected to the main one.

For example one user had a username of readymix, so his web site address was www.newave.net.au/members/readymix.

Now this is all fine for an initial startup, but what happens if you have printed all your letterheads, and business cards with that web site address on it, and then you decide to change ISP’s, and you need to change your website address? It’s off to the printers again for a new batch of business card and letterheads, and you would also have to notify all your existing customers and suppliers of your new website address.

Worse still, if your website was listed in the search engines, then anyone trying to click your website would get an error, for all intensive purposes, you would not exist! Not a desirable situation is it?

Thankfully there is another option, and that is purchasing your very own domain name.

Unlike the free ISP website, a domain remains the same and never changes, so you can print your business cards and letterheads in confidence knowing this.

Now getting your own domain is a relatively simple process.

The first thing you want to decide is what type of domain extension you are after.

A domain extension is the last part of the domain name from the last dot onwards. E.g. With my domain timbuchalka.com the extension is .com

The .com extension is a very common one, easily the most used one on the Internet, and I would recommend you stick to that. However you do have a choice of choosing other extensions, for example in Australia, there is a .com.au extension, in Singapore there is .com.sg, and China has .com.cn

Each country may have specific eligibility rules about domain names, so you would need to check specifically with registers for the rules if you decide to register a domain for a specific country.

The standard .com domain generally has no rules; pretty well anyone can register one.

One thing you should be wary of is trademark infringement, if you go and try to register www.mcdonalds.com (or something with the word mcdonalds in the domain name) you may find McDonalds (the burger people) chasing you for using their name. There is an independent organization that looks after these type of disputes, but generally from what I have read and seen they side with the “big guy” particularly if they have a registered trademark.

There are literally millions of .com domains registered, so most of the one-word domain names have been taken. Generally you need to be a bit inventive (or in my case have an unusual surname, which makes it pretty easy to grab the domain you want e.g. buchalka.com and timbuchalka.com).

There are many, many places to register domain names, I personally use www.namecheap.com but another good place to register domains is www.godaddy.com

You will also need to decide how long to register your domain for (generally you get a discount if you pre-pay for a number of years at a time, rather than just paying for a year at a time).

In addition there are buy and sell websites available where you can pay for a domain name, perhaps with a name you were after. These days, domains are big business, and in fact there are some people making a nice living buying and selling websites).

Now we need to discuss web hosting next, because registering a domain name does just that, a registration. To actually use the domain name requires you to place or “host” the domain name with a site on the Internet. That site (commonly referred to as a web host) allows your website to be “seen” on the Internet (note that they don’t put your domain name into a search engine for you, I will discuss how to do this in a future article).

Now if you do any shopping around, you will find web hosting companies who will also offer you to register a domain with them as a package deal.

I recommend you do not do this! If, for any reason you decide to move to another web host, they can “hold you hostage” because they control your domain. Whilst it’s likely that you will be able to move your domain, it may well be a drawn out and/or an expensive process. Of course not all web hosts would do this, but I believe it’s not worth risking it. You also need to consider what happens if the web host went out of business.

My recommendation is to register a domain with a domain register such as namecheap or godaddy. Then go out and find a web host, and once you have, it’s a relatively simple process to “point” your domain name to the new web host. If you ever decide to move to another web host, you simply “point” your domain to the new web host, simple and it means you retain control.

Now I am not suggesting that the above two places are the only places to register domains, there are hundreds of places to get register domains, but in my experience these two are competitively priced and are reputable.

When researching for web hosts, you will find literally thousands of options (and indeed godaddy offer web hosting, although personally I don’t recommend you use them for this purpose). You will find it’s a case of you get what you pay for, if a deal seems to good to be true, it probably should be avoided.

Two web hosts I have had good experience with are www.dreamhost.com and www.kiosk.ws . But again there are hundreds of options for you out there.

I hope this introductory article has been a good introduction to domain names. Hopefully I have not bored to many of the seasoned marketers out there, for them, it is probably a case of ho hum, I will certainly be getting into more detail and more complex subjects in future posts.

Please post your comments below, and I would particularly appreciate you passing on details of my website to anyone you think would benefit from the information, the more people I can help, the better, after all my mission here is give all the information I know to the readers of this blog, to give them the power to be a success on the Internet, as I have been lucky enough to achieve.

Oh, and one last thing, there are no affiliate links here guys, just real useful information. This is not about me trying to make a buck pushing a particular companies products, it’s all about helping others.

Cheers

Tim