There are only few people / sites I truly respect when it comes to digital marketing strategy – ShoeMoney.com is one of them. If you have some time head over there and see what he is all about. Anyway, ShoeMoney posted a video on his strategy of buying sites / domains for the SEO value. Watching his video got me thinking about my own personal domain strategy. For the most part I agree with him, however his strategy is more about volume and timing. Buy a website that has some existing value like great inbounds links from .org .edu, or .gov and then milk it for all its worth – when / if it booted from a search engine go on to the next. Rinse and repeat. This strategy works very well when done right, however I wanted interject my own opinion and strategy on the subject.
First and foremost, I am a fan of buying, holding and using domains of all shapes and sizes. I personally own over 1,000 domains that cover just about any topic you can imagine. Some domains I bought because I felt the value of them would increase (e.g. short .mobi or keyword rich domains) some I bought because they were related to a online business I was building or planning on building and some I bought because I just thought they were cool. Over the years I have bought my domains using every possible method imaginable, the most common being registering expired domains or buying through a domain marketplace like Sedo.com.
So the real question becomes, you have this great domain(s) now what do you do with it? Well obviously building a full website with all the SEO best practices in mind is the optimal course. However, there are many options you have. First, regardless of what you choose to do with a newly acquired domain as soon as you gain access to it have it 301 redirected to an existing domain. This is a point that so many people miss, first why wouldn’t you do it? You would be shocked at how much traffic is generated from the sites that I have 301′d to a live and monetized (which is a whole other topic) domain. Keep in mind these domains offer zero or very little SEO value, the reason being that if they had a PageRank I would build them out in order to maximize their SEO value. So where does this traffic come from? You would be surprised…people typing in the URL, old / random inbound links or any other possible reason. Yes the traffic is minimal from each domain, I would guess each redirected domain drives on average 100 visits a month – yes tiny numbers but times that by 500 domains and you get 50,000 monthly visits…from doing nothing.
Redirecting a domain to a existing website or building it out are only two options. A third option that I try and take advantage of when I have time is somewhere in between. For example, lets say I bought a domain that has some good keywords and a very low PageRank / search engine presence. I would at the very minimum build that out into a blog related to the keywords or low-content site that automatically updates with some sort of content (a couple great tricks out there to pull in RSS content that is spiderable). We all know that search engines love to see fresh content, therefore I always have been in favor of only building a website if I have the time to update or have the technology that meets my needs. My new favorite strategy is building video websites using the YouTube.com API – amazing results. Of course I cant forget to mention how important it is to implement white-hat SEO best practices into every website. The funny thing is, I have had plenty of people contact me saying they want to buy these websites from me…haven’t sold any yet, just waiting on a good enough offer.
Anyway, collecting domains is not for everyone since there is a cost. On average I pay about $8 a year (not including hosting costs) to renew each domain. $8 a year for 1 domain does not sound like a lot but when you have 100′s or thousands of domains the costs can add up quickly. Luckily through my various domain monetization methods (live with ads, parked with adsense, etc) I always cover my costs.
You can watch the full video below or head on over to ShoeMoney.com to check out his blog post.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds like an interesting strategy, now if we could come up with a packaged WordPress, fully SEO’d, in which you’d only have to type in a keyword or two to start using it with the Youtube API, would we be spammers? :P
ehhh that would be in the “grey” area – but man would that work great (until of course google black-listed the site).
There are tools out there that take an existing wordpress site, with all the settings (seo pluggins, permalinks set, etc…) and create multiple blogs on subdomains. The same can be done cross domain as well.
I hope you can post an article about your 301 redirects to monitized websites :)