Web Hosting

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Web Hosting - Good Alternative for Affiliate Marketing

Wednesday, Apr 8, 2009

Affiliate marketing is all about getting people to your website and directing them to your affiliates. The more traffic you can send through, the more profit you will see. In order to get this traffic, you need to get the attention of Internet consumers, and that means you have to appeal to what Internet consumers want. As you should be well aware, one thing that Internet consumers are interested in is web hosting.

“Take advantage of what you have learned as an affiliate marketer to help others while profiting yourself by directing new Internet prospectors to their web hosting needs.”

Advantages to Affiliate Marketing for Web Hosting

People Need Web Hosting

Anyone who is interested in affiliate marketing is going to need web hosting and they're going to need to go somewhere to find out about web hosting. That's where you come in. Take advantage of what you have learned as an affiliate marketer to help others while profiting yourself by directing new Internet prospectors to their web hosting needs.

Web Hosting Can Be Profitable

One of the main things people are looking for on the Internet is the opportunity to make money. With the right web hosting company and a solid business plan, anyone can see their profits skyrocket. Savvy Internet consumers know this, which is why they will be looking for web hosting affiliate sites like yours.

Web Hosting Affiliate Marketing Tip: Make Sure That Your Web Hosting Affiliate Site is Clear

While many people may know that they need web hosting, they may not all be sure exactly what web hosting is. There are different kinds of web hosting and different services that web hosting companies provide. Your site should let visitors know the information about web hosting they need to transact with your web hosting affiliates.

Virtual Real Estate

If your domain name is associated with a virtual property, than it stands to reason that the value of the property depends on the neighborhood and what the property offers. Just like you won't want to spend half a million dollars on a run-down one-room shack in Nowhere, Alabama, you don't want to buy domain names that have very little potential to resell or are worthless. You want names that attract buyers and represent a virtual property that appreciates over time.

Just like in real estate there are multiple ways to make money from a house transaction, there are also multiple ways to make money off a domain name. In real estate, if you are looking for a home to call your own then you buy it with the hopes of staying with it for more than five years. Appreciation in the neighborhood and the home eventually end up making your investment worthwhile. However, there are real estate investors that either buy property to flip them or to rent out to others. The same thing can be done to domain names, in a manner of speaking.

THREE WAYS TO MAKE MONEY

Going back to our real estate analogy, the three most common ways to make money with housing is to flip it, rent it out, or live in it while you build it up. These three ways are exactly how you make money with domain names.

Flipping

Flipping real estate is likely to get you in big trouble these days, but flipping a domain name is much easier. Flipping is that you buy a domain name for the expressed purpose of turning around and selling it very quickly. You don't intend to hold it to develop it, nor do you intend to park it and use it to see how much traffic it generates.

You can taste the domain for a period of five day and during that time you can evaluate whether it's worth flipping or not. If you buy a domain name thinking it's going to be a quick sale, there's no guarantee you will attract a buyer at any time. There are expenses for putting up on auction and for tasting it now. So, you will make a very small investment on each domain name when you decide to flip it. You can recoup it many fold by selling it, but you actually have to do some work first online to flip it.

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Thinking Up Your Own

Now, if you've done some research you can still think up your own. Or, maybe you have the inside scoop on some very new trend that has something to do with your interests. This can be a line of investigation that is quite profitable. The more you are familiar with a specific industry, the more likelihood you will be able to create some domain names that appeal to somebody who wants to buy it.

Most people have some degree of familiarity with commercial ventures. If you work in a bank, you probably know what the popular finance terms are and what products people are most interested in buying at particular time periods. This is also important.

You want to create the domain name when it has the strength and fascination to sell. For instance, right now many people might be more interested in reverse mortgages as the baby boomers retire.

If you were a mortgage loan officer, you probably know all the lingo and what products can appeal to these customers. By default, they will also be the same terms that appeal to the buyer of a domain name.

So, it doesn't even matter if you are having trouble making ends meet because of the housing collapse story, that reservoir of knowledge you built up can be very valuable in helping you restructure your knowledge base so it still makes you money.

Use what you know and follow the trends. That's really all there is to it. Some weeks some types of domains are hot and others are not. Not every domain name will sell when you auction it, so you have to be persistent.

It's a volume game and you can't get emotionally attached to finding the "perfect" name or trying to make a big kill in one area. The safest way to make money in domain names is to treat it like a business. The domain names are not your babies; they are a product used to generate revenue.

So, don't waste too much time trying to be clever and find that big scoring domain name. Odds are, if it happens, it will hit you like a tripped wire as you innocently make toast or something.

Taste Test Before You Buy

In the business, there is something called "tasting" domains. Tasting a domain allows you five days grace period to figure out if you want to pay the full registration fee. It gives domainers some time to research the probability that this domain name will generate revenue.

During the grace period is up, the buyer of the domain can actually use the domain name and park a page full of advertising and affiliate links. This is a very standard practice because it allows a domainer the ability to see what traffic shows up spontaneously and how they get there by checking the site statistics. This gives the domain buyer some insight into whether they've picked a good name or not.

At first domain tasting was free, so many domain buyers simply tasted multiple domain names at a time and dropped any that did not appear to be generating any interest, without any expense other than their time. In fact, some domains were continuously tasted and then dropped before the grace period ended and the registration fee was due. Then, they were picked up again by the same buyer for another free 5-day grace period and thus kept in a portfolio of virtual registrations that were never paid. This practice is called domain kiting and these domains are being targeted for blacklisting by Google.

COSTS OF DOMAIN TASTING

Right now the fee for domain tasting is set to be between $0.20 and $0.30, which is far less than the $7 to $10 you'll pay to register the domain name. They say the changes will be effective mid 2008. So, you can still taste a domain, but you will pay a small fee and it won't be refunded if you choose not to register the domain. The fee is an annual fee and if you don't register the domain expires.

The change in the fee structure for domain tasting does add some expense, but not significant expenses for someone just starting. The fees are being focused on domain kiters, front runners, and other would-be domain hogs that aren't letting others register their names on the off chance they can make a fast buck for nothing. Now, they don't have the same motivation because it will cost them $1 to taste every five-domain names. Since the numbers showed they were actively tasting millions of domain names, the costs begin to skyrocket for these fraud artists into the hundreds of thousands. So, the fee structure is a boon to genuine domainers who aren't involved in domain kiting or front running. It leaves more domain names available for them to taste and gives them more freedom in the market without big players scooping up untold domain names for nothing.

EXPIRED DOMAIN NAMES

There's no way to really tell what is going to happen after the fees take effect, but the hope is that tasters will let their names expire and not try to taste them again (domain kiting). That's because each time they taste it they will have to pay $0.20 for every five days. At that rate, it's much cheaper to pay the $7 for the year and just register it. So, those names will fall into the expired domains list.

Next, all the front runners that were blindly tasting domains will not be willing to put out money on bad names. If they continue the practice, it's very probable that irate domainers would simply log into their services and bomb them with bad names that cost them $.0.20 per taste, since it is a blind process. That would quickly teach them to quit usurping the right of the person searching for a new name that they've taken the time to research and create. Network Solutions has already stated it would drop the practice once a fee took effect, but if not, you can bet the Internet community won't stand for it. So, once they drop this practice, all those names will fall into the expired list too.

Justdropped.com is a website that offers a daily deleted domains list and also a way to search through expired domains. You do have to sign up to the site even if the service is free. You can give it a starting and ending suffix and even choose the extensions you want searched. It can be a great way to sit on the sidelines and see what domains are dropping out of the cybersky from all the domain kiting and front runners that will be dropping out of the game. Their loss could be your gain.

Dot Com And Then Some

The most volume of sales is in the .com domain, although the .org and .net are starting to show some good sales in the higher price ranges. The extensions mean the following:



" .com - Commercial
" .net - Network
" .org - Organization (usually non-profit)
" .info - Resource website.


There are many more extensions than these four, but these are the most popular PC-based Internet domain extensions. Some domain name business owners do only .com names and others will try their hand at other types of extensions. It's a personal decision, but .com are really the most popular and highly sought after domain names.

It's up to you whether you try to expand into other domain extensions, instead of just the .com one. There are new extensions coming out every day and it's wise to keep abreast of that, particularly now that cell phones are becoming very common in our society.

More and more people are using them to surf the web and some extensions are coming out like the .mobi extension. They are like finding a whole new undiscovered country and you could be the first one to plant your flag on the surface and stake your claim.

While they may not be extremely profitable now, they could end up being goldmines in the future. A well-diversified portfolio will want to take advantage of any new area that begins to show promise in the domain name business. You will have to pay more for some of these extensions and the same rules apply: no trademark infringement.

One way to verify whether something is going to be big is to check out the adoption rate in other countries. It might give you a head's up on the coming wave of the future in your own country.

Speaking of countries, you can get a .co.uk or .de domain name. One is for Great Britain and the other for Germany. While you might think you have to be a resident to get one of these names, it's not true. The different country extensions have different rules and some of them do require some residency and others do not.

Do your homework when deciding on whether or not you want to go for domain names from countries other than where you reside.

Domain Squatters Rights Are A Thing Of The Past

You need to be avoiding any celebrity names that might be construed as a trademark infringement. There is now legislation to protect trademark and service mark owners from a practice called "cybersquatting." Cybersquatting is when a person decides to try to appropriate a domain name that they are using in "bad faith" to profit from later.

The Federal Law is called The AntiCyberSquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) and is also known as the Truth in Domain Names Act. It was passed in 2003. It is now being used to get judgments against domainers who have appropriated names to either ransom to the original owner or profit from despite having no rights to the name.

In order for a domain name to fall under this act, it has to be "identical or confusingly similar" to some other trademark or service mark already copyrighted, it has to be a famous or distinctive mark, and the buyer intended to profit from the domain name.

Another form of trademark violation is the typosquatter. In this case, the domain name may be very similar to another trademark or service mark name except for a misspelling. Both the cybersquatter and typosquatters are being taken to court and judgements are being levied against them.

SOME COURT CASES

If you think that people don't mean serious business, when they are protecting their trademarks, you would be wrong. Take the case of John Zuccarini who reportedly held 5500 domain names when he was first arrested. His mistake was not in domaining, but in taking popular and famous brand names like Cartoon Network and Hot Wheels and then registering typosquats of those domains. To add tot he insult, he then redirected all the people who landed on his sites to pornographic websites.

The ACPA was a direct result of this man's efforts and included a clause that made it illegal to use squatted domain name for the expressed purpose of deceiving people into viewing obscene materials. He went to prison for 2 ½ years and was released in 2005. In addition, his actions falls under a civil suit that has him requiring to pay back many hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus attorney's fees, to the people who have been harmed by his activities. He was the first person to be prosecuted under the ACPA, but he won't be the last.


Other court cases center on a celebrity, like Julia Roberts. She sued the owner, Russell Boyd, after he placed the domain name up for sale, even though the site was dedicated as a fan site. While Julia did get rights to the domain name, it opened a can of worms, as other people may own private names as domain names that aren't necessarily famous until later.

Boyd was ordered to transfer the name to Julia Roberts, but no monies or jail time was awarded. Right now, there are people holding domain names that might be construed as trademark infringement but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be sued for holding it.

Domain Names As Products

A domain name is any name you type into the URL address locator in any web browser. It is usually prefixed with a www extension to signify that it is used in the World Wide Web (WWW). While the www prefix is part of the domain name, in actuality, only the actual domain name after the www and period are actually registered. No one owns the right to the www prefix.

For instance, if you have a domain name called www.thisismydomainname.com, the actual registered name is thisismydomainname.com. There are a number of different suffixes available for domain name: .com. .net, .org, etc. The most recognizable are .com suffixes that specify a commercial enterprise.

When domain names first came on the scene it, there was a lot of confusion as to how they would be used in a free market and what sorts of legal issues might arise from the use of a domain name. It quickly became clear that a domain name is very much a trademark and so the types of laws that could apply for improper registering and use of a domain name are laws that deal with trademark infringement.

So, even if you register a domain name, if it is someone else's trademark, you don't get to keep it or ransom it to the proper owner of that trademark. Initially, there were many opportunists who did try to register large, brand name, and domain names of multinational companies and then try to sell the domain name back to the company for a large sum of money.

This is now referred to as the "cyber-squatting" and is illegal under trademark infringement laws. We will discuss how to avoid getting into trouble with trademark laws in Chapter 7 more in-depth.

What Makes For A Good Domain Name?

So, the product you are selling is specifically the name that you either buy from someone else or create and register on your own. The best domain names are those that are easy to remember and highly marketable.

The best domain names have the same types of characteristics:

" Consist of one or two words
One-word domain names are all pretty much taken, but two word ones can be a good place to start.

" Use search words
People search for particular things on the Internet. Get a domain name with some of those highly searched terms and it can be perceived as being more valuable.

" Multiple meanings
Words that have multiple marketing niches or meanings might be more marketable.

" Marketing ring
Those words that have a snappy ring to them are more easily sold than boring terms.

" Take advantage of misspelled words
Typos are your friend in the domain name business. They can lead to a very profitable site that attracts visitors who consistently type in the wrong domain name address.

Domain Name Profit Potential

HOW MUCH MONEY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

Now, comes the bottom line. How much money are we talking about? It all depends on the volume of your domain name business. The higher the volume, the more likelihood you will make a bigger profit. That's because each individual domain name that you park or buy is not going to be profit leader. You will have some losers and some big winners. In addition, you will have a lower volume to work with if you are developing the sites instead of just flipping them. That's because it takes more time, but the profit can be more too. It all depends on what model you are using.

The simplest way to make money off a domain name is to flip it. So, say you buy a domain name for $6.50/year. This pricing is set for volume buyers of domain names. If you are not a volume buyer, you may end up paying a lot more. But, for someone who owns their own domain name business, you can get pricing for $10 or less per year for each domain name your register. These are the domain names being registered under the .com, .org, or the .net extensions.

You buy the domain name and then you want to sell it. What's a reasonable profit for flipping it? There's no way to tell, actually. The sale price is usually determined by the value buyers perceive the domain name to have. That's why most sales are done in an auction format with multiple bidders. The price of a domain name is completely arbitrary, and some do not sell at all.

The average resale value of domains is less than $200 for those that sell. If you have multiple no-sells then that eats into that profit. So, you are working a volume business with some domains selling and others not. You can get rid of any domains that aren't selling and try new ones, but you do have to spend to either taste the domain or register it. For the most part, if you sell your $6.50 for $13.00, you've made 100% profit. And, that's the way you have to look at your numbers.

You can buy other domains that are worth more like $200 and flip those, but there's not guarantee those sell either. However, those that do sell, are sure to make a very large return on your investment when you look at the percentage of monies made in comparison to what you spent. There is no other place right now where you can put down money and get such a large rate of return. So, obviously, the risk is that it doesn't sell at all. With a large enough portfolio, those dead domains don't really affect your overall earnings. Instead, you might want to try a different strategy other than flipping for those to see if they can sell later, or recycle them back into cyberspace after the year is out.

For instance, say you buy 10 domain names for $10 and only half sell. Your expense was $100 for the entire year. The half that sold made a profit of 200% on average or $300. So, now you have pocketed $200. With the other four you decide to park and make advertising revenue through campaigns and affiliate programs. They generate maybe $10 per month each. So that's $40 per month or $480 per year of additional income. So, now your $100 investment has netted an annual return of $680.

But, wait, there's still one domain name left over. It didn't flip, you decided to park it, and the traffic skyrocketed. You decide to develop it into a viable website. You can sell that website later in the thousands of dollars. Your $100 investment makes several hundred percent for a return on investment. Try doing that with any other type of product or service and you will see that domain names are unique in their ability to generate large sums of money, very quickly.

So, you see, the business model itself is very profitable, but volume, hard work, and some luck play a role in how much you actually make. You will not be working with 10 domain names per month. Your goal is to work with hundreds of domain names per month. If you bought 10 domain names every business day that's 200 domain names you have in your monthly portfolio. Assuming the rate of return on the last investment, even without a stellar domain name, you can end up with about $13,600 per month income.

There is no guarantee, however, that you can manage that much volume or that you will be as successful as the previous example demonstrates. One thing is for sure though, by the end of the year, you will have a portfolio of 2400 domain names. Considering that many domain name resellers have portfolios of domain names in the hundreds of thousands, you can see that volume is the key to a successful domain name business.

Develope Or Sell Only

Now that you've seen from some of the other articles in this series, how easy it is to get a parked page service, it might not be as intimidating to figure out how to develop the site. WhyPark.com can get you started in developing a full site. If you find one of your parked domains is doing a good business, then it might make more sense to keep the domain name and develop the site. There are a number of things that will make a site appreciate in value. They are:

" PageRank
The Google score that influences placement in search engines. The score is from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best score.

" Content
A site with unique content is worth more than one that is just serving up garbage or duplicate content.

" One-way inbound links
The number of links to your site can impact the value since they are a way of determining your site's popularity and worth. It's not just a matter of how many inbound links you have, but also of the quality of the person linking to you.

" Marketable Niche
You will want to be in on a marketing niche that will appreciate. Selling clothing pins may make you feel light-headed, but wrack up a big zero in sales.

" Site revenue
When a buyer asks about buying a site, they're interested in how much revenue it generates each month. If you have no revenue to speak of, it won't be as interesting to your buyer unless they really want the domain name for something.

Developing a site can as easy or as hard as you make it. You don't want to spend too much making it pretty as much as you want to get the above five characteristics to make it sellable. You can pay freelancers to create unique content for your site and keep track of PageRank and analytics with the Google Toolbar.

If you find that you are gathering enough traffic to do some retail sales or affiliate marketing, you can start to add that into the equation too. There are many different online vendors that offer canned website products that include a shopping cart, if that's what you are interested in. However, you don't necessarily have to develop your site to this level to get the five characteristics above to be good enough to sell for a profit.

You can actually just start to develop a marketing pipeline, with the main aim to capture as many email addresses as you can and develop an emailing list. This will help you to develop a mass emailing campaign for specific affiliate offers or even your own products.

Are Good Domain Names Hard To Find

Good domain names aren't hard to come by. You don't even have to have a way with words. That's because you can get domain names by simply understanding what people are searching for on the web. Another great way to determine a good domain name is to find out what other names have sold to give you an idea on similar names that might sell as well. In this chapter, we will discuss where to find names that sell and how to go about creating ones that might be winners for your own portfolio.

You won't be able to really get into single word domain names, even if you see them selling in hundreds of thousands. All these names are taken, and that's why they're so valuable. Your job will be to look for domain names with multiple words that might sell for two to four thousand. From there, you can get an idea of what might make a good domain name to start.


DNJOURNAL.COM

This website has a weekly listing of domain name sales. Under the "Domain Sales" list you will find good information on current domain name sales, and also where they sold. Most importantly, you will find out how much they sold for in dollars. Scroll down the page at http://www.dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm and you will find the AfternicDLS sales between $2,000 and $4,000. If you eventually want to expand into .net sales too, there is also information on these domain sales at this website.


FIND THE BUZZ

What are people discussing this week? Where's the buzz and why are tongues wagging? Well, you can find that sort of thing out at different areas on the web. Buzz.yahoo.com is one domain where you find articles on the latest thing people are discussing on the Internet. It can be a great resource if you are looking for are riding a time-specific trend. They have a Top Ten searches that shows you want people coming to the site are interested in reading about. You will find that gas prices are top on everyone's mind. That can give an enterprising domain name business owner a good understanding of what might serve as a good niche to explore.

Blogs are also fabulous areas to find out the latest trends or what people are interested in discussing. The problem is that you don't want to have to go to individual blogs all day just to see stories. It would take too long. So, you go to some place like Technorati.com. Bloggers generally add their blogs to this site and they are compiled for everyone and categorized into different subjects. It makes it easy to search and see what people are interested in.

At Blogger Central in Technorati, you can also find a top tags searches and this can give you some valuable clues on what the latest trends are on the World Wide Web. If you use the advanced search feature on Technorati, you can even start with a specific phrase you are interested in developing into domain names and see many current postings on your subject matter.

Lastly, if you are thinking of auctioning off your domain names on e-bay, why not check out what their users are searching for? Pulse.ebay.com gives you just that sort of information even though it won't be too helpful with fine-tuning your domain name. You can find Honest Hosting at glob@t.com.

A Domain Name Business Can Be Fun

While we do want to generate income and not get too emotionally attached to the process of generating domain names, we can still have some fun with the entire process. Maybe you don't consider yourself hip or trendy, but that doesn't mean you can't start to learn the slang of the Internet and figure out ways to combine it into fun domain name terms.

Having fun with domain names can be like a treasure hunt. You have to figure out what everyone else thinks is worth hunting for, and then you have to get there first. Once you own the treasure, others will pay you to give it to them.

You can create hip and trendy domain names by watching the people who influence culture. Even if you don't know what the trends are in your social circle, you want to get to know who sets those trends. These people are celebrities and people who influence the next big thing. Once you know who those people are, all you have to do is watch them a bit more and be ready to pounce on a new trend the minute appears to be taking off.

Another cultural trick is to use anything that you find in your own background. Are you Hispanic? Why not register a few Spanish term .com domain names and see how they sell? The markets are opening up for foreign terms and they might be very profitable later on.

Keep your eye on the news for new technologies that are being developed or news events that are capturing other people's attention. You can start to mine the domain names from these events, although we would suggest to keep away from any that might be too highly emotionally charged. Those people that registered Virginia Tech domain names after the massacre there ended up fielding a lot of hate mail. It's okay to profit on top events, just be careful what kind of crowd you are attracting.

SLANG ABBREVIATIONS

Some words are slang abbreviations that everyone is familiar with, like luv for love or u for you. In an age that is becoming more and more abbreviated these types of instant message or familiar abbreviations can make good domain names. If you don't have a specific abbreviation in mind or it is already taken, then you can make up a new one just by using the following four prefixes in your domain name:

" i for Internet, instant
" e for Electronic
" u for You
" v for Virtual


This small list can yield a number of different opportunities. The e prefix has been done to death, but that doesn't mean you can't think of any new ones that might be attractive to new buyers. The English language is very versatile and that's the beauty of domaining.

Other types of slang are numerical and they also are becoming more easily sold. Everybody knows what 411 and 911 means. These are taken, but you get the message. Now there are other numbers too that mean specific things to people that would attract a big crowd. It's perfectly okay to add numbers to your domain name to help you be creative.

Lastly, every industry has it's own set of slang that make good domain names too. Think of taxes and form 1040-A. It probably won't surprise you that 1040.com takes you to an online tax preparation site. Well, there are many other forms of industrial slang that have yet to be mined and that can be broadened to make for creative two word domain names. If you are in a particular business that uses a lot of abbreviations, you can start to brainstorm there and see what might pop up.