They scanned my authority website for dead links
Then put up some content relative to my dead outbound links on their own site
Then email and ask if they can quote my site with link back to me (naturally I agree)
When I confirm it’s ok they tell me about the dead link saying they know how hard it is to run large important sites and monitor everything and offer their (new) page as an alternative link.

I can see that working for them.

1. You don’t need the same traffic numbers, if trying to appeal to local B&B’s/Guesthouses & businesses for advertising you don’t need to be aiming for 10,000 visitors per day, getting 100-300 visitors per day can suffice. That makes the return on investment and time spent much quicker and more appealing. From the few sites I have up that are around a month or so old they all get around 50 visitors per day just based on the few articles each site has. Almost time to start looking for advertising, that’s not the way it usually works.

2. Huge advertiser base – with geographical areas you can target offline and online businesses, there are often databases available giving you full contact details. Unlike a generic product site you can target 10,000 individual advertisers with only a hundred visitors per day, instead of aiming for a hundred advertisers on 10,000 visitors, if you can make the argument to advertise convincing this can mean a great income based on small numbers. For Ayr I bought a database of 1200 local businesses names & addresses to work from.

3. Repeat residual income – the holy grail, once established your less reliant on search engine listings, traffic numbers, CTR’s, Adsense or affiliate income. You invoice the local advertisers yearly and build a steady repeat income which is just the best feeling.

4. Stability – Lot’s of small steady income streams from advertisers locally gives better stability without the huge swings chasing organic serps can bring, each year you’ll lose some and gain some, overall aiming to grow a bit. One established geo site I bought currently earns around £7000 per year from local advertisers, rising around £1000 per year over the last few years.

5. Credibility & Cost of entry – If you want to work from the townname.co.uk or .com domain then it’s a pretty low barrier to entry for the best name, if you want to sell phones from phones.co.uk online that domain rocks but costs 6 figures, however if you want to run a website for Largs on Largs.co.uk that domain cost £800 is would seem to me the most suitable name which should add credibility & desirability to potential advertisers. It’s a cheap way to be the best.

6. Links – Not being product based and aiming more for info/tourism & attractions seems to be less competitive and easier to get links, there are usually lots of other town sites and many of the webmasters on them seem content to link to other info sites as long as your site looks good and does a decent job of promoting the area/town.

Overall thoughts on buying domains to lease recently are pretty much unchanged:

1. Make sure the domain encompasses a whole or substantial part of a business, it has to be attractive to an end user to build a second store front on, don’t try to get into too small a niche.

2. Make sure the niche you choose has a lot of players or potential end users, your going to need a big audience to find the right person with vision, I sent out around 30 emails last week and in one reply where I was asking for £75 per month the reply stated he would buy it for £75! When speaking on the phone to another potential end user he was shocked the domain I was trying to lease cost me over £1000, those are hurdles that still need to be tackled.

3. Again if there is a fee paid for the domain which is usually the case with good domains I try and get that back or most of it back within 12 months and therefore look to lease out for 2 or 3 years.

4. The domain needs to be ranked for it’s name, of the 5 leased out, only one was not ranking top 10 for it’s name, it’s that added value that helps make a deal just now.

That’s probably all the progress I’ll make with that side of my business this year, next year I need to crank it up and I have a lot in the pot that I have been working on all year quietly so I really want to aim to take it above £1k a month and towards £2k a month. it’s certainly not get rich quick but once the time & effort is invested if I have 10-20 valuable domains leased out in the future making an income of 4 figures a month it would make that side of my business pretty valuable considering the investment would have paid itself back within 12 months, that business would be valued on a multiple of it’s income and the fact that the capital assets appreciate in value each year. It may be an option to sell the busines as a going concern one day or just live of the income.

Recap/timeline on the last year for domain leasing.

• It was August last year I made my first post where I considered the idea: Become an internet landlord
• 2 months later in October I had my first domain leased out
• In January 2008 I put in my to do list for the year “I would like to progress with leasing a bit more so would look to have at least 2 domains or sites leased out on long leases to expand on what I have started there and prove to myself it can grow.” 
• I knew ranking and buidling some value into the domains would take time and hamper progress in 2008 so it was nice in May to lease out my second domain.
• After leasing out the second one it really opened my eyes to the added value this gives a good domain.
• It would be November before my 3rd, 4th & 5th lease would come, no surprise, I expected a year of buying and working on them before I could get down to realising them as assets.

All in all from a standing start around a year ago to get to £775 per month is fair enough, the first year is certainly the hardest and next year should offer more opportunities with more money being spent advertising online. Almost all my domain buying has been done in the last 12 months – it’s been a big shift for me but I think the fact that I have detailed a great deal of it on this blog shows it’s certainly not too late for anyone, there is opportunity if you have motivation.

When looking for unused domains you can search for standard template and placeholder text in the search engines, so your searching for things like:

“Under Construction. The site you are trying to view does not currently have a default page.”
“Directory Listing Denied”
“The requested object does exist on this server”
“Why is this page displayed?”
“domain login”
“does not exist”
“cannot be found”

You can get inventive and creative when trying to narrow down domains that are not properly parked or in use, for example if a domain name owner has name servers down for sedo or some registrars but don’t park the domain properly you get their standard text which shows a possible forgetfulness or possibly that the domain is neglected or forgotten about.

You can also find old websites that have stopped working through neglect using searches for typical ASP and PHP errors which can turn up some real gems!

It is therefor the perfect time to go on the offensive, you will not go a week without seeing several rumours of takeover bids for weak and vulnerable companies and we do have billion or million dollar budgets the same opportunities still exist for those that are proactive on a smaller scale.

Sellers of websites are more open to negotiation, in fact I am finding cold call emails are being met more favourably as money can be tight it’s a great time to build up contact with a site you wish to purchase, online business venture are being closed down every day. Businesses that could be 1-10 years old, have old backlinks and good rankings but the business model has run into difficulty.

You can pay to get lists of companies in administration, these companies more than often have domain names, those domains are not expiring and could have traffic, rankings & value, some companies trade under their name but also hold category killer generic domains, you can use tools such as DomainTools to find other domains a company in administration has.

Administrators try and sell the business as quickly as possible when they are taken in however in many cases if a buyer is not found their job is to get as much money as possible for the creditors and that’s a golden opportunity to contact the administrator and offer money for a domain name, you do that enough times and you will find a diamond in the rough.

So far I have managed to make money online for which I am grateful and working from home is a blast especially with the summer coming up, can’t complain at all. I have managed to think outside the box and offer products and services and pretty much along the way I have had a basic strategy or plan but nothing that would be classed as a business plan, I think many of us have floated along trying to make the best of what we can with limited means and knowledge, after all how can you have experience of something that has just been invented!

For the most part my plan if it could be called one was along the lines of

1/ Get good rankings
2/ Therefore get lots of traffic
3/ Monetise that traffic through various income streams
4/ Then constantly worry about stability and losing traffic and income!

I am heading towards the stage of really trying to work out my exit strategy, the internet has changed a lot in the last 8 years since I have been dabbling and it will change a hell of a lot in the next decade or so, it will change in ways that I have no control over and although it can be fun trying new ideas and methods I am probably less likely to be successful as a developer in the future, I’m pretty much an online socialphobe (domain available)  in that I don’t do twitter, myspace, facebook, linkedin or any of those social sites, possibly because my ‘local offline’ friends don’t use them so I have never had the urge to embrace them and probably won’t for the most part, I like email – it works just fine for me.

So my exit strategy is twofold

1/ Sell my main income site(s) for a lump sum, I have done well to build an income and one that stretches back far enough to have what we would call ‘a good history’ as far as websites go.

2/ After selling up & paying off the mortgage and storing some cash, keep a warchest to further invest in some domains and slowly increase domain leasing to a stable income that keep the house comfortably in what I would class as a retired state with no demand on my time or worries about income, very occasionally selling the odd domain but being a particularly unmotivated seller when the buyers do come and approach me it should make the right ingredients for a good sale price.

If I do sell my main income site and work on domain leasing that would be the perfect scenario for me, holding a well researched and valuable portfolio with some leased out.

The thing about an exit strategy is that it needs to be considered and acted upon well before your ready to sell up, if you heading towards the point that your earnings are good and traffic high with a pretty stable history you need to ensure that if you ever get in a position whereby your considering selling that you can have everything to hand.

Stats – I used to use stats from my host, Matrixstats which I disliked and didn’t trust, I realised 2 years ago that if I ever wanted to sell or even sell advertising I needed consistent and stable stats I could rely on with a good timeline, therefore Google analytics came along at a very good time which I have installed, I now have 2 full years stats using a trusted 3rd party which shows that in the last 12 months I received 8.7 million visitors and the 12 months prior to that was just over 8 million, good strong stats that are instantly verifiable.

Income – When dealing with online sales it is important to use a good shopping cart and backup your data, previous customers details and sales broken down by products, sounds very simple duh… but if you run more than one site it’s easy to collate income, after all it all ends up coming to you, you have to ensure that you can drill down your data and show by site and by product where the income is coming from, again I wasn’t doing this a few years ago, I was letting Worldpay process customer details with forms to jump straight there and collating overall data for my books rather than saving customers details and product details. Two years ago I had a decent shopping cart installed and modified to give me the reporting that I needed so that I could really get a grasp of what was going on.

Tax – I phoned the local tax office to ask about a possible sale and spoke to an adviser who informed me that a sale of my main websites would mean I would be liable to capital gains tax at 10%, also if I sold at the start of the tax year I would not need to report it until the following April with my normal returns and pay that the following January, in effect giving me one and a half years with the money to generate interest to help pay the 10% capital gains bill.

Look for the value in your traffic/site and make sure it is being stored and recorded properly, this covers stats, product order history, images, customer details, newsletter subscribers, subscriptions. All this data can amount to a monetary value by itself in the future so needs to be backed up, split up adn recoreded well. These things didn’t take much time to implement but retrospectively if I hadn’t done them I would be at a loss now when trying to justify an asking price for a sale.

So if you are ever considering an exit strategy make sure you do so long before you need to cash out your chips. Over the last 2 weeks I have been gathering all my stats and data and valuing my main site for a possible sale in the future, I am actually speaking to one group of people who are going through everything right now considering an acquisition and already have my asking price, it has made my life so much easier by having everything in place to show exactly what I have and what it has done, if someone had been interested in buying my sites 2 years ago I’d have been in a bit of a mess.
 

Still, I often get the feeling my emails never get in front of the right people, customer services would likely be the wrong people who could just as easily dismiss my email as marketing spam so I have been trying to reach for the top and although nothing concrete as yet, it seems to be paying off.

I have emailed companies like overstock.com in the past but no response, this time I googled for the CEO’s name of the company I was contacting, which is usually easy enough to find out from press releases etc, I would then send 3 emails and check for them bouncing in the form of:

johnsmith@company.com
j.smith@company.com
jsmith@company.com

These seem to be the most frequent used formats used and it’s been very successful with 2 emails usually bouncing and one getting to the right person, so instead of responses like this from customer services;

We’re always looking at ways to make xxxxxxxx.com even better and your comments are a big help to us. I’ll make sure to share them with the right team.

Thanks for getting in touch with us. I hope you’ll visit us again soon.

Best regards,

I have been getting responses like this from the CEO:

Hi Scott,
 
Thanks. xxxxx and xxxxxx will be in touch.
 
Regards
xxxxxxxxx

(Names have been xxxxx’d out)

This is much more encouraging, I would also guess that my email being passed down the way from the CEO to someone in charge of their marketing would be looked at closer than an email going through customer services and being sent upwards. I have now spoken to 3 companies regarding a lease this week which at the very least makes me feel I’m making some headway and being a bit more productive

That’s the thing, I don’t have any tattoos, I only speak one language and I can’t draw but I have 2500 tattoo designs, thousands of user submitted images and do online sales of translations in many languages. You can make plenty from utilising other people’s talents and connecting people together

- take ‘freelancing’
- Find a list of all types of trades & services that people freelance
- Find a way of supplying the service online by being unique, an angle or more choice
- Connect freelancers with customers on your own site offering the service yourself or just a  contact point.

In my example I found translators & tattoo artists who can provide drawings and made deals it’s a wonderful illustration of benefiting from the work of others, I don’t see it as taking advantage as those people would not be connected and making extra money if it was not for webmasters creating these sites. I have a few other very viral sites that build content everyday through user input gathering links and content in a genuine way that lets them double their traffic each year.

I also enjoy watching the discovery channels and reading scientific magazines commenting to my wife that I find it exciting and pretty amazing that while millions are spent in laboratories over many years developing new ways products, pills, services and cures it is people like us that can still benefit greatly along the way by getting a piece of the action, be that affiliate sales of new products or domain acquisitions for future re-sale or information sites with advertising.

I’ve taken more than my fair share of NO’s lately, sending emails trying to find a bargain on a domain, an LL.com had almost agreed to sell for $10k subject to a few fine details which I had agreed to and then they changed their mind, par for the course I guess. I also had a superb future domain that was an LLL word I was waiting to hear back disappear from under my nose, the guy who I was dealing with who was agreeable to the sale had told me to leave it 3-6 months and come back and when I did he had left the company and the new guy said no! arghh, when I get lots of NO’s I feel the prime domains are all slipping from me and this window of opportunity which still exists is getting ever smaller.

I only ever let the NO’s slow me down momentarilly as I am pretty focused, so I grabbed the bull by the horns over the last week and spent £12k on 2 UK domains, now that’s gotta hurt One is very much a domain for today and one very much for the future. They are just transferring just now so I’ll comment on them later.

So a possible opportunity lies there for anyone in the UK reading this that wanted to run his sites and work on them a bit SEO wise.

Steve does all sorts of custom gifts, mugs, keyrings, clocks, aprons, coasters, mousemats and many more with text/images as per the customers wishes, always done well with clubs and national events. Two main sites, one for retail and one for the trade.

What he is looking for is someone to host his main couple of websites and look to generate traffic through them in return for a percentage of the sales, Steve carries out all orders and has done this for years.

Website was first created in August 2001, 53 inbound links (yahoo) and PR2, at present it is not generating much traffic or sales through being neglected, Steve is happy to do all the time sensitive jobs like adding products to the online store & processing and completing all orders, the shopping cart is written in ASP.

Better than a dropshipper you would get a better cut probably around 10% rather than the usual 4-8% affiliate commission but this should be seen a long term relationship and not something to pickup and put down when you get bored.

An excellent opportunity for someone to build up a long term relationship and good income working with a reliable trader working part time, if anyone is interested then please contact me scott (at) leaseadomain.co.uk with a brief outline of who you are so that I can pass on to Steve.

You should

• Be able to host and update/manage the websites (asp with access DB)
• Have some experience and or ideas to generate traffic and sales
• Preferably be in the UK so that you can be contacted by email or phone

I’d rather not post the url so contact me if you wanted a note of the domain to check it out before sending in your details.

Well I firmly believe that you can, each and every person reading this post has the potential to do it within the next few years, no question, if you have $1000 and time it can be achieved and it is exactly what I will be doing myself, if that sounds incredible then the fact that I am also about to tell you how to do it should also seem pretty incredible!

When I sold ledlightbulbs for £10k that was a good domain sale, I didn’t sell ledbulbs.co.uk for £30k as that domain has so much value being ranked at the top of a market that has yet to peak, so rightly or wrongly, I will wait.

I firmly believe that having a domain rank for it’s name if it is a prime generic that describes a popular sought after service or product can add huge value to a domain, take an example like cruises.co.uk which was bought in 2006 for £95k, it now ranks no.1 for the term ‘cruises’ in the UK and was sold for £560,000 – that’s quite a bit of business in what is a very fast growing sector. Most people believe the new owner can get that outlay back pretty quickly.

I bought camerabag.co.uk for £250 a few months ago and now ranked I am considering selling it for £1000-£2000 with offers on the table which again has shown me that getting ranked and putting the domain in the shop window helps find buyers and adds huge value.

Getting a domain to rank for it’s name can be a challenge if competitive but certainly doable, especially with all the freely available SEO advice around on blogs and forums so for most reading this ranking the domain for it’s name should be achievable.

So if you bought cruises.co.uk and you ranked it therefore ‘putting it in the shop window’ and at the same time generating traffic, income and interest then you would be well on your way to making large amounts of money, SEO/organic rankings still have wrongly voodoo qualities where if you don’t know how it’s done it looks like a special art, magic! Once ranked you have the domain right in front of the market that you dominate and right in front of those that may have the money to buy such a premium domain, thus increasing value and chances of an end sale.

Now let’s say you build a mini site and then rank cruises.co.uk you start to get enquiries, from the ridiculous offers of £200 to some more serious offers in high 5/ low 6 figures until eventually the right person matches your valuation and you do a deal at £560,000 job done!

But wait, there is just one problem! You don’t have £95,000 to buy the domain in the first instance!

That is where you have to separate yourself from the crowd, what if you went to the owner of cruises.co.uk in 2006 who wanted £95k and said to them that you could work on the domain for free and increase the value of their prime domain so much that they could give you a 25% share in the domain and when it sold they would still be better off than selling it now, if you managed to do that in this example rather than getting £95k the owner could eventually have had £420,000 and you could have had £120,000.

That is all purely hypothetical but the idea is good, finding the right domain, person and meeting certain criteria is the hard part, there are a few things you would need .

• To find and target an extremely strong domain name worth £10k+ today
• The domain having some history and ranking, albeit rank poorly for it’s word/name/product saving you the sandbox and a possible 2 year wait to rank well.
• The ability to convince the owner of the domain of your credentials and ability to do a good job
• A domain owner with vision
• A good contract

I am negotiating a contract whereby I take over 50% ownership of a .com domain that I will work on to rank and eventually sell thus giving the existing domain owner a better payout than he could get just selling the domain right now, he has agreed and he is now taking legal advice on getting a contract made up that will satisfy both of us. It’s guesswork but I would say the domain is worth around $30,000-$50,000 in an emerging market and would have the potential to be somewhere in 6 figures if a few years time, having it ranked No.1 and generating traffic will help us get the sale that will realise the original owners foresight in reg’ing it back in 1996. I did offer $5000 at the start but it was clear the owner of this domain was not interested in a quick bit of cash.

It helps that I can quote lots of rankings and domains that I have already to build his confidence in my ability, I am also at the very early stages of doing the same with a .co.uk, the owner is seriously considering my offer which would be more like a 20% share to myself but would have the potential to earn me £100,000 if ranked and sold later on in the next couple of years, of course neither of these may come to fruition as no contracts are signed and negotiations are taking a while, but hey, at least I am trying and all I have to lose is my time, huge rewards for little risk – the fact I have one YES and one ‘I will seriously consider it’ makes me think this has legs, I have to admit that I have only offered to do this on 2 domains so far and both are interested, I did choose my targets well though to maximise my chances, the .co.uk has been for sale for quite a few years and the owner wants high 6 figures which I think one day he will get but it would happen a lot sooner with my help.

The biggest hurdle seems to be a contract but it’s not entirely new, shared ownership of assets is commonplace so I am sure within the next couple of months I will have one of these done and will have immediately taken part ownership in a prime generic that I otherwise would struggle to afford.