What is the point of owning a domain name that has not been developed. Some would argue that one can make money through parking their domain name, which can add a lot of value to it. But let’s be honest with ourselves, how much can one really make off of a parked page? Maybe, with a VERY, VERY, VERY good name, a person can make an amount in the 3-digit range or low 4-digit range per month.

This is where opinion comes into play. Some might say that they’re happy making a 3-digit or 4-digit number in a given month. But I think we can all agree when I say there are so many other commodities you can invest in that would allow you to make those kind of numbers or even a greater amount.

The commonly known quote, “value is in the eyes of its beholder” is something that I used to be a big believer in. But really, unless the beholder is an end-user, value is in the eyes of the end-user who eventually ends up with the domain if they do. I know it’s a bit confusing, but you may want to read that last sentence over a few times to understand it. The main point: Don’t be mislead by the “Domain King’s” famous (in the domain industry) quote.

Message to Rick: I love your blog, read it everyday, but I just had to write my opinion about your quote.

The domain owner will open your letter (hopefully) and see your professional letter as well as your signature that makes you sound like your in a high position in a company (whether you are or you are not). Psychologically, the domain owner will think, wow, if someone high up from this company is interested in my domain, it’s clearly worth more than I thought. That thought will automatically shoot through their head, conciously or unconciously. This will make the domain owner raise his or her price for the name when telling you what he or she is looking to get for it.

Now, let’s say you send a really casual letter to a domain owner. If the domain owner comes from an important position in his or her domain investment company, chances are your letter will go right to junk. Especially if there are spelling errors and/or if the grammar is bad, they’re not going to respond to you. Or if you start your letter with “Hey,” rather than “To Whom It May Concern;” the domain owner will once again send your letter straight to the junk folder.

So what point am I trying to get accross here? Don’t be too professional or too casual! Being too professional will cost you more if the domain owner is willing to sell his or her domain name and not to mention, might intimidate the owner. Being too casual can easily get your letter dragged to the junk folder. Mix it up a bit and hopefully you’ll see not only more, but better transactions in your future.

And let’s be honest folks, not only are micro niches limited in the diversity of content, but they’re also limited in their success. While there probably aren’t many websites about geometric equations (which lowers my competition), keep in mind that there’s not a huge number of people searching for geometric equations either. When discussing potential traffic, micro niche websites are lacking any future.

I will say that I have had, and do have micro niche websites. The most money any of my micro niches have made was about $30/month. While some of them may have had a good amount of traffic, there were no advertisers paying good money for clicks (via Google AdSense), so it was very hard to make a good amount of money off them. I’ve seen others who have been somewhat successful with their micro niche websites, but it really depends on the niche you pick. And with so many micro niche websites out there, it’s almost impossible to find a non-copetitive micro niche with a good search volume and high paying advertisers. The main point here is that micro niches don’t have even a decent chance of success because of the lack of good advertisers in most micro niches.

I’m not going to lie to you, there have been many people who have been EXTREMELY successful with micro niche websites and made a ton of money off them. But it’s hard to do. Extremely hard. That’s why I say micro niche websites are a hype. Soon people will realize the slim chance of success with them, and realize they’re all a hype. I’d appreciate comments on this, and I’d especially love to hear personal experiences.

CreditCardsHeaven.au is the perfect example of a website that took a step up in the minisite world. CreditCardsHeaven started out as your average minisite. It was built on WordPress. The owner put up a couple of articles. But the issue was that the domain name was not getting any traffic or making any revenue. This is when the owner decided that it was time to upgrade CreditCardsHeaven, and began developing a few credit card applications that could make the website more user-friendly, advance the functioning of the website, as well as produce more revenue.

6 MONTHS LATER…the website is producing a solid amount of revenue and traffic, as well as ranking highly in Google’s Austrailian search engine (Google.com.au). It is the first search result on the third page for “credit cards”. They are on the fiest page for the keyword, “compare credit cards”. These are some of the top-searched keywords in the credit card field. Not only is it amazing that this minisite went from getting no traffic to getting all of this organic traffic, but it’s amazing that a website could improve their search engine rankings by this much. It’s comparable to being on the first page for the keyword “domain” or “domain name”.

Above is my favorite function of the CreditCardsHeaven minisite. It is so personalized to each and every individual user. With the above function you can choose the type of card you’re looking for with many different options, and then it’ll show you the matching cards they offer. This is just a really advanced, cool function on their website.

With many advanced functions, good content, great organization and an amazing design, CreditCardsHeaven.com.au is at the next level of minisites. They even have a nice financial resources page with some helpful links.

I’d love to get your comments on this so make sure to submit them below!

I am not the owner of this website, this is a paid post.

Most of the people whom I asked said the same thing for the most part. One source, who would like to remain anonymous stated:

“Reseller value is the price you can sell something at, to someone who is going to resell it (not an end-user.)”

This quote was similar to most of the answers I received. This goes all the way back to domain speculation. Domain speculation is speculating the price of domain names. But if there is no end user for a domain name, then this so called “reseller value” drops to nothing.

The moral of the story is that while there is a reseller value out there, all that matters in the end is whether there’s an end-user for the name. There will be no reseller value in the end if there’s no end user. From the start there could be a reseller value, but once a domain name is purchased and resold a couple of times, the name loses its “reseller value” until an end user comes along (which for many domain names, it’s likely this will never happen.)

Hopefully you were able to follow along. If not, feel free to submit your questions below. I’d also love to hear your comments.

P.S. If your comment gets deleted, click “edit > undo” and your comment will re-appear. Our comment box should be fixed by the end of this weekend.

This minisite, until AEIOU began hiding their prices and told clients to contact them, had a face value of about $250. They also talk very highly of themselves and get clients excited to see results. I am going to leave the representative I worked with from AEIOU nameless, but he stated that I should begin getting traffic and making some money within 3 months. He even told me their was a chance that the site would be making money when I got home from my 1-month trip to Fiji this past summer.

Here were my results:

Traffic: 0 Visitors

Revenue $0.00

I decided to take a closer look at the content found on my minisite, especially considering my stats. I couldn’t begin to believe that the people who wrote these articles did more than a second of research. The content was so terrible I couldn’t believe my eyes. I might as well of had my neighbor’s 5 year old write the content. It probably would’ve been better. That’s how bad the content was.

Rick Latona states in his one of his most recent blog posts (titled: “There’s no money in web design. AEIOU is getting out of the outsourcing business.” on RickLatona.com:

The reality is there is no money in web design. It’s hard. The customers are hard to please. The margins are slim and frankly, there are bigger fish to fry.

Rick, maybe what you mean to say is that there’s no money for the customer, there’s only money for AEIOU. And the customers are hard to please? I wonder why. Maybe it’s because you talk very highly of AEIOU, and then go off building bad minisites, suggesting to customers to improve and market their minisite on their own, like you did to me. (Personally, I think AEIOU is lieing and there’s no marketing done to the site whatsoever). And you’re right, there are bigger fish to get money from. But promise me that you will build something worth their money.

That’s why I think AEIOU is shutting down their minisite production. They just aren’t working and Rick can’t admit that.

Rick, I hope you get the chance to read this and comment on this. Please note I have a high level of respect for you. You’re one of the best domainer’s in the industry. I love reading RickLatona.com. But my AEIOU experience was a complete letdown.

This underlying factor to selling domain names and websites is the buyer.

Seller’s need to concentrate on organizing their sale and marketing their sale, however there is one factor they do not have control over: The Buyer.

This is something I have been thinking over the past week as my auction on Flippa continues on. Currently there is a bidding war between two distinct people. Each buyer continues to bid at the last minute (for no apparent reason), each bid extending the auction another 4 hours. They know, or should know, that bidding at the last second does nothing. I can tell you that I have no idea what is going through the mind of these buyers. Why do they bid every 4 to 8 hours? Why do they wait until the last few minutes to bid?

These are all things I’m thinking about as my auction continues. I am no God. I don’t possess the answers for these things. But I can try to put myself in the buyer’s shoes, predict their motives, and take proper action from there. I’d love to get your ideas on the psychological mindset of buyers, so any comments would be appreciated.

I finally came across Flippa.com a few days ago. I was very impressed by the simplicity of the website. The homepage gave me two options: Buy a Website or Sell a Website. The organization and layout of the website was simple, yet advanced at the same time. Some of the most important differences I noticed between Flippa.com and the old SitePoint marketplace were:

• I could choose to sell my website through a private sale or an auction.
• Powerful and effective criteria search.
• Flippa requires a phone verification for accounts, preventing non-paying bidders and scammers.
• You must verify website ownership to sell your website.
• All general site statistics for each listing can be viewed while browsing through listings (you don’t need to click on it for details).
• A simple, user-friendly layout
• You can now view recently sold and ending soon listings.
• Flippa provides statistics about the Flippa marketplace in the footer.

You can see from the list above that many important improvements have been made on the Flippa.com marketplace. I can’t stress the simplicity of the Flippa website enough. If a website is easy to use, more users will use it and navigate through more pages.

Personally, I am very impressed with the Flippa.com website. I listed on of my big projects on their a few days ago (link to sale), so I’ll have to wait and see how that sale goes. If you get a chance to take a look at that link, you’ll get to see how what your average Flippa listing looks like.

Some people are unhappy about the switch from the SitePoint website marketplace to Flippa, and I can’t imagine why. Flippa.com is a 5-star marketplace. With 35% of its listings sold, about $320,000 in sales in the past week, and about $27,000,000 in sales altogether, I can’t see how you can go wrong with listing your website on Flippa.com. But I’d like to hear your comments on Flippa, so please submit them below!

One of the most important things that I have always failed to learn from in the past up until now is to NEVER launch a website prematurely. Make sure everything is in working order, and looks good. Every viewer you get to your site is just as important as the next. Generally speaking, you hope to get that viewer to return to your website at some point. When a user goes onto a website, see’s it is maufunctioning, ugly, or unprofessional, chances are you won’t get that visitor to come back to your website anytime soon. The next time he comes across it, that visitor will figure that they have been to the website before, it’s not a good website, and he/she doesn’t want to waist their time going back.

Another thing that I have learned is to always have a marketing plan. Whether your marketing plan is to not market your website at all, or your marketing plan is to advertise with every search engine on the web, it makes no difference. It’s important to have a FLEXIBLE marketing plan too. If your website is unexpectedly getting thousands of organic hits a day all of the sudden, then maybe you’ll want to do a little less marketing. Or if you planned on getting organic traffic, and don’t get any, you may want to do more marketing. Just leave room for changes based on what you see.

One of the important things about launching a new website is gettting enough visitors to your website to make some good money, and hopefully have some returning visitors, as I talked about before. Promotions, contests, and other things of that sort are great for opening websites. Visitors like it, and will  most likely return to see A) if they won, or B) what the site is all about. You want to make the customer’s experience the absolute best it can be.

Link exchanges are another thing that work great for opening sites. Email a bunch of different industry-related websites, post a few threads on the different forums, and you will have plenty of people waiting to do a link exchange with you. Not only to link exchanges get you a little bit more of potential traffic from other peoples sites, but it also gives you exposure, and more importantly gives you links to get a page rank. Page ranks are very important because the higher your page rank, the higher your website is ranked in Google, relatively speaking. Google likes your website more than it does lower page rank sites. Chances are you’ll get more organic traffic if you can get yourself a high page rank. Backlinks are one of the main things Google considers when considering your website’s page rank.

One of the things a site must do is evaluate their different sources of income, and how they can expand their sources of income. Lets say a websites primary goal is to make money off of Google AdSense. Well, that website should also consider adding ads from Commission Junction, ClickBank, Blogvertiser, etc. The more sources of income a website has, the more a website can potentially make. Make sure not to overload the website with ads and sources of income, but have enough to make some profit easily off of the website. In my opinion, Google AdSense, and any PPC publishers (Bidvertiser is also very popular) are the best way to go for ads on your website. People aren’t paying what they used to for adspace with the economy at rock bottom like it is these days. So Google AdSense is definitely one of my favorite recession-proof tools for income.

Anyways, I would love to hear your opinion about my tips, as well as hear some of your tips for launching a website the right way. I hope you all enjoyed the article. Sorry it was lengthy.

Dear Mr./Ms./Mrs. _____________ (try not to use Sir/Madam)

I am contacting you on behalf of _____________ (company name). We own the domain name www._______________. We thought your company might take an interest in it because ____________________.

The domain name gets ______ visitors monthly (always use the monthly visitors because it will look like a bigger number). It is registered at ________________, and is set to expire _______________.

Our asking price is only $_________ (set the asking price a little above what you’re willing to take), but we do have some flexibility. If you’re interested, feel free to email us back, or call us at ____-____-____.

Thanks,

(Full Name)

(Position in Company)

(Company Name)

That end-user email has worked out for me in the past, but I would also love to see the emails you generally send. So please comment below on what you think of my end-user email, and make sure to submit your comments with the end-user emails you use to send to end-users. I hope this post helps to everyone who is sending out end-user emails!