WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

A few weeks ago, Mirjam won our $5 comment contest. She turned around and flipped that $5 into five new domain names with free privacy registration. (Here’s how she registered those domain names for $1 each. Here’s how we messed up the promotion and found out about the bait-and-switch nature of the deal.)

So, we thought we would follow Mirjam’s example and buy some domain names for some of our projects.

Project #1 – Making Money with Google AdWords and Niche Keyword Sites

Spyfu lists the top 1000 most expensive keywords based on estimated cost per clicks for the ads. It’s not a perfect guess, but it’s a pretty good way to find the keywords that pay more. (That’s one of the biggest things we walked away with from Josh’s ebook on Article Marketing and $5 sites.)

• A click on one of our google ads on our domain names minisite gets over $1.00 per click.
• In contrast, a click on one of the google ads on our Japanese cooking recipe site gets closer to 10 cents per click.

Since we have to fight for to get traffic on both sites, doesn’t it make sense to drive traffic to a site that pays more?

Project #2 – Making Money through Sponsored Posts

One of the ways we make money on this site is through sponsored posts. (Mostly through PayPerPost, but also through Smorty). Then, we take some of the cash we make from the sponsored posts and give it back to our readers as cash prizes. (Basically, we’ll pay you to be our friend.)

We know that one of the dangers of sponsored posts is that you’ll get slapped with a page rank of 0 by google. So we’re thinking of moving our sponsored posts onto a separate review blog on a separate domain name. (That way, we won’t drag down Webdiggin or our review about BlueHost which is sitting on a subdomain of webdiggin.)

So we need a separate domain name. Maybe we’ll set up a free blogger account for the review blog to show how you can make money with sponsored posts at no cost to you.

With that in mind, we tried to get some good .info domain names from GoDaddy. Originally we wanted just one or two domain names, but when you buy 5, you get free privacy registration, so we decided to buy 5 domains.

The challenge of finding good domain names – project 1: niche keyword sites

We just went to spyfu’s most expensive keywords and registered those .info domain names. (Well, we had to add a word before or after, but you get the point)

I think the danger of this becoming a black hat tactic is if we just load a page with keywords. That would violate Google’s terms of service as they specifically don’t allow sites that are made-for-adsense.

But we’re trying to create mini-sites with content following Josh’s 5 dollar a day formula. We’ll see what happens.

The challenge of finding good domain names – project 2: Sponsored Post review sites

We thought that since we were buying .info domain names, it’d be easier to come up with some snappy, short one word addresses.

No such luck. All of the good one word .info domain names are taken. We even tried using a web tool (onewordonly.com), but none of the domain names they suggested were any good. Even worse, the domain names that they suggested that we actually liked weren’t even available when we tried at GoDaddy.

We got tired of trying to look up short one word domain names. So we went the opposite route and picked the most obscure ones that we could find.

(After all, it’s not a .com domain name so we won’t be getting traffic by word-of-mouth in the real world. The only way we plan on getting traffic to these projects is online – either links or paid traffic)

Strangely, floccinaucinihilipilification.info was already taken. We had to settle for floccinaucinihilipilificatious information.

(Oh, and by the way, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.info is already taken as well.)

Do Search Engines penalize you if you have a .info domain name instead of a .com or .org?

37 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) leaders came up with a document at SEOMoz that talks about the factors involved in search engine ranking. On the whole, they felt that the domain extension of the linking site (edu, gov, com, ca, etc) was of moderate importance (2.5 out of 5), but there was of course a difference of opinions:

• “.gov and .edu sites are more important.”
• “taken alone, meaningless, but as part of the larger whole, very important.”
• “The power of a “.edu” top level domain does *not* come from the .edu TLD.”

So assuming you have other SEO factors going for you, your .info domain could should place well for a specific search term.

Warning: How we messed up the 5 domains with free privacy registration deal for $5

So GoDaddy currently has two sales:

• $0.99/yr per .info domain name.
• free privacy registration if you order 5 or more domain names at once.

Here’s the catch.

• The $0.99 per year per .info domain name is only for the first year. The second year will cost you $5.49 per year. The third year goes for $6.99. Eventually, you work your way back up to around the $10 mark which is the norm for domain names.

Registration Pricing Per Year (per domain)

• By default, domain names are set to renew automatically. So if you’ve registered 5 .info domain names, next year, you’ll be automatically charged $27.45 for your 5 .info domain names. It gets worse every year. (You can change them to manual renew in the control panel)
• The free privacy registration if you order 5 or more domain names at the same time is only valid if you select privacy registration for each and every single domain name before you complete the order.
• We made a mistake. We turned on the privacy registration for one domain name and at the bottom of the invoice, it said privacy registration $0.00. We thought that meant all of our domain names had privacy registration. (After all, with BlueHost, you get privacy for free on any domain name…) When we tried to add privacy registration afterwards, we found out that the special offer was only valid if you added privacy registration before you completed the order.
• If you try to add privacy registration after you place the order, you’ll get charged $6.99 per year per domain name.
• Wait, it gets better… The following year, you’ll get charged $8.99 per year per domain name ($6.99 if they still have the sale price).
• So, the 5 domain names with free privacy registration will cost $5 (plus tax) the first year, but at least $62.40 the second year (34.95 for privacy + 27.45 for registration), and more every year after that.

What are we going to do about the GoDaddy bait-and-switch?

We’ve switched our domain names to manual renewal. Just before April next year, we’re going to transfer these domain names to our BlueHost account. It’ll cost us $10 / year for each domain name, but we’ll get free privacy. (Actually, we’ll probably ditch the domain names that aren’t working)

Bottom Line: We bought 5 .info domain names for $5 and we’re going to experiment with making money through 1) Google ads on niche keyword sites, and 2) sponsored posts.

Question: What’s the best deal you’ve seen online for domain names with privacy?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...