First I have to quantify this post by saying I don’t know anything about domaining so these are my thoughts on the subject but that doesn’t mean anyone should take it as advice or the like

Domain names, well certainly the good one’s, brandable one’s and generic one’s are all snapped up, more and more people come to the internet each day looking to make money, build websites and start businesses. It seems to me that perhaps it is early days now but the domain market will mature at some point.

Good domains should rise in value, I think most people would agree with that, I also think there should be a lease market that will develop at some point. Think about the high street in any major city that you know of, how many for sale signs do you see up in the main shops? Very rare. People/businesses that own shops know that rather than sell a shop in a prime location for a quick buck they can lease their shops to generate an income, all the time owning an asset that can continue to rise in value.

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How did you start out?
What sites do you build?
Do you just build lots and see what sticks?

Personally I took a different approach when choosing my first genre, many years ago I subscribed to Wordtracker who offer a free email service whereby they email me the top searched terms, I still get this today. This would be more a reflective approach to look at what is already out there and what is already profitable and then to try and jump on the bandwagon by looking to obtain a piece of the action.

In this email you get

1/ The top 300 surge report
These are the top 300 queries from the last 48 hours, which represents the complete queries from the largest Metacrawlers on the web (Metacrawler/Dogpile etc..) for the last 48 hours.

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Databases are cool! That may sound like something that only a total computer nerd would say but I don’t care as they make me money.

Just over a year a go I had an idea for a site that I thought would be fun to do as a joint project with my daughter (I often look for projects that I can get the whole family involved in, a/ For fun and b/ For the cheap labour )

The site required the gathering of a vast amount of data so I decided to take a shortcut and purchase a database from Oddity Software. As the same database could be bought by anybody and I wanted mine to be unique so I combined it with another freely available database. This gave me unique content as well as adding value to the readers. As you’ve probably guessed I’m not sharing full site details in this post but I’ll to give a similar example of what I did.
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I’m into week number two of the holiday, I’ve ran out of clean pants and am currently sat in some Turkish café playing a lottery to see what today’s pizza will be like. Which got me thinking, what would be really cool is an online resort guide.

The way I’d see it working is as a user submitted review site, where tourists could write about the various places they’ve visited and eateries they’d got food poisoning at (only happened to my girlfriend once so far this year).

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Over the years I’ve learnt a great deal from various forums, websites and blogs. One of the motives behind the Friday roundup is to share links to useful information and not so easily found posts so as to minimize the cumulative time spent browsing through the crud. I find forums like Digital Point have many really knowledgeable members who have contributed to some excellent threads that many entrepreneurs would really benefit from reading. However for every good thread there are hundreds that are a complete waste of reading time and if you bring General Chat and the Politics section into contention then those 100s of pointless time draining posts could easily turn into 1000s.

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2 Months ago I revisited the subject of mini sites breaking them down into the 3 main types being, product based, information based & tool/calculator based.

I think it is pretty safe to say one of the most successful method is a tool or calculator based mini site. A tool or calculator does a simple job cleanly and quickly that is of use or service to the visitor thus making it extremely bookmark worthy and link worthy through social sites such as Digg/Stumble etc etc

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Sometimes you look for ways of making money and sometimes they find you.

Last month my better half gave me the good news that she was pregnant with our second child, yikes! It wasn’t long after I had heard of a test you can do online, is it a boy or a girl?

In the UK it is a sad fact that at the 20 week pregnancy scan they can no longer tell you the sex of your child as it leaves them open to being sued {sigh}. So they won’t say anymore unlike first time round when we had our son, some people prefer a surprise, I don’t, I prefer to plan ahead so when a company offers the ability to send away a blood sample and tell you to within 99% the sex of your child at 8 weeks into the pregnancy I find that appealing!

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It might come as no surprise to some of you but I have to say I have caught the domain bug, it is a bit like gambling on future events really and for me I am happy to place money on the fact that these are land prices that shall rise in value for some time to come.

I’m never really content just following a huge crowd of people on safe bets when it comes to making money, in the world of making money online through website and domains I think it is fair to say there is a very large crowd nowadays and it is growing all the time. Most forums are so heavily diluted with poor domains and duplicate turnkey sites it’s hard to see anything of value at times. What I have done recently applies to possible website ideas as well as looking to put some money down on domain names for future profit.

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Some people seem to come up with new business and site ideas really easily whilst others struggle to see an opportunity when it’s staring them in the face. I find if you put your self in the right mindset ideas and opportunities spring up all over the place.

To me the right mindset involves having an open mind and actively looking for inspiration. The following are a few examples of ideas I’ve thought of but haven’t taken any further (yet).
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I have 2 new business ideas for you to ponder over and give your thoughts to their viability sent in from readers of our blog. A good idea often comes from the ability to look at something that is done already and find a way to do it better.

I started reading a book called “How they started ”(Amazon UK) yesterday, which covers 30 well known businesses that were started without any large existing capital or family connections, basically one person or a small group of people that had an idea and how that was transformed into a successful business. Looks very good from what I have read so far so may be of interest to some of you, not sure if it’s availability outside of the UK as yet.

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