Wasting money buying domain names?

I buy a lot of domain names with the intention of eventually building a website for it. This got me in trouble a few times because my wife could see the money going out, but wasn't seeing much coming in. I kept telling her to have faith and that I would eventually get around to turning them into money making dynamos, but the truth was that by the time I got into my domain buying frenzy, I was getting burned out on making websites.

When I first started out, I used Front Page to build my sites. (an aside: Before any of you purists go comatose, I only used it for the split screen preview ability and the text editing features. I still typed everything by hand, I just didn't have to save and load it in a browser constantly.) Building a website with FrontPage is ok if you only have one site and its not very complex, but once you get more than 100 pages in a few websites FrontPage gets difficult.

Then I discovered Joomla, and it rekindled the spark. Joomla made it much easier to maintain larger sites. But it takes time to upload the package, create and SQL database, come up with a template, create your sections and categories, before finally getting to add content. And even though its easy to add content to Joomla, it can be a tedious process. I wanted something that would kickstart my content and let me add more at a liesurely pace.

Enter WhyPark. WhyPark is an excellent tool for developers like me who have an excess of domain names and a marked lack of free time. I simply point my unused domains at the WhyPark name servers, enter in a few keywords and viola! I have a website prefilled with content. Thanks to the custom pages feature, I can even add my own unique content until it reaches the point that a full blown Joomla site is required. Then its a simple matter of getting some links to the website so it can start getting some traffic.

My two main tools for getting links are the digiXMAS Directory Submitter and the digiXMAS Article Submitter. It takes about 8 to 10 hours to write an article on the subject of the site, submit it to a few hundred article directories and then submit it to approximately 1500 web directories. The end result is about 1000 unique backlinks almost immediately, and many more over the life of the website. Both tools only cost a one time upfront fee (no monthly or yearly subscription is involved), so I can continue submitting my websites to new directories as they are added to each lists (which update daily).

But what about the economics of all this?

The Costs
The tools I've mentioned (WhyPark, Directory Submitter, and Article Submitter) seem expensive at face value. The Directory Submitter is $150 for a 20 website account, and the Article Submitter is $100 for 20 articles. Then the WhyPark account is $99.95 for 100 domains. Add in the cost of the domains at $6.99 a piece, and you're starting to talk some serious cash. If you bought 100 domains you'd spend $699. Add in the WhyPark account and you're up to $798.95. Buy 5 directory ($750) and article ($500) submitter packages and you're grand total works out to $2048.95! That's a mortgage payment or two for most of us!

We mustn't forget the time investment either. If it takes 1 hour per website to register the domain, point it to WhyPark, and edit the domain's settings in your WhyPark account plus another 10 hours to get 1000 links to your site, your talking a time investment of 1100 hours (11 hours times 100 websites). That's a part time job.

The Rewards
Just using Google Adsense alone will produce a net positive income. If each of your sites averages a measly 10 cents per day ($0.10), you're still making $10 per day. 365 days in a year means $3650 a year on average for a net income of $1601.05 your first year and a net income of $2951 your second year because you only have the cost of the domain names to pay for year after year (WhyPark, Article Submitter, and Directory Submitter are one time fees, remember?).

That doesn't seem like a lot considering you just sunk 1100 hours (27.5 40 hours work weeks) into this venture, but ask anyone who uses Adsense and they'll tell you that ten cents per day is easy to do. All of my sites average at least 25 cents per day, and several average more than $1 per day (my best site earns an average of $4.21 each day from Adsense). Even $0.25 per day increases your first year profit to over $7000, and if you get all your sites to earn just $1 per day, you're looking at almost $35k a year! Not to shabby for a part time job. Essentially, this is gaurranteed money because you only have to earn $5.61 per day (that's less than six cents per site per day) to break even.

Bootstrapping Your Way To Glory
Ok, well maybe "Glory" is a bit strong, but you can do this in chunks to save some upfront costs. Both DigiXMAS products have smaller packages, but I don't recommend them because they're less cost efficient. The 20 website and 20 article packages get you the most bang for your buck. Since there is no bigger package, you could work in chunks of 20 websites and build your way up to the big money more slowly. Buying just the Article Submitter package at DigiXMAS will cost $100, and 20 domain names from 1 & 1 will add another $139.80. Your WhyPark account will still cost $99.95, but you'll have some "unused capacity" that we can still take advantage of (more on that in a minute). Now our start up cost grand total is a mere $339.75. Still a risk for some, but a very managable start up cost for pretty much anyone.

But I mentioned unused capacity in your WhyPark account, didn't I? Your account will handle up to 100 domain names, but you only bought 20. What to do with the other 80 available slots? Subdomains! You see, you can create a subdomain at 1 & 1 and point it to WhyPark just like a regular domain. Subdomains (eg: http://rentals.fargovideo.com) tend not to do as well as a regular domains (eg: http://www.fargovideo.com), but that doesn't really matter since they cost you nothing. Every extra penny you can squeeze out of it cost you nothing but a few minutes of time to earn. Filling your remaining 80 domain slots at WhyPark with subdomains will let you fully utilize your account without adding additional monetary burdens.

The Final Verdict
The math is solid, and I did not even go into ways of earning even more money using affiliate programs (that's for another post). Making money online is easy once you have the right tools, and with these three things (Adsense, WhyPark, and DigiXMAS) you can be on your way to a nice income.