Update

Little update on the last post I made about a few new buys as I had a couple of emails asking how they are panning out.

The catch for £40 free-animations.co.uk did £486 in Oct. 75,000 visitors

It’s fairly important to point out this wasn’t just catching an expired domain and parking it, I bought the old site and put it back together. It’s not the first time I have done this, quite a few years ago I bought the domain globalspine.net from a domainer after it had expired, I then used archive & google to track down the old owners who were in New Zealand and I think from memory paid them $2000 for a full copy of the old site and put it back together. Free Animations I could see used to have thousands of pages/files so was an obvious candidate and if I had not caught it for £40 I’d have been happy to spend a few hundred trying to buy it.

Nine Planets has been rocking and has hit £240 in a single day, should be an interesting 12 months with this titan. Leaving it to get some numbers & data on it before deciding for sure the way forward.

I bought Protect.co.uk last month - which could really work well for a variety of angles, children’s safety, alarms, insurance so I think has a lot of value but not an obvious product generic, still cost a few thousand though! A cheap addition was Ski Insurance for a few hundred.

.org.uk domains are really beginning to rise in value and selling for mid £x,xxx, simple economics with supply & demand and with some of the best .co.uk unlikely to get developed or ever sold people are turning to the next best thing which is .org.uk and offers the exact same ability to rank, now would be a good time to buy a category killer and I secured furniture.org.uk which I will come back to in another post, also managed to get something done with SJ.co.uk in the meantime.

On the website front I bought CeramicsToday.com which I found was dead & de-listed from Google, contacted the owner and bought the domain and then negotiated a copy of most of the content, lots of dead pages still and a bit messy but now back in google and traffic at around 700/day, I can see that ending up around 1-2k a day traffic wise. Across all my sites for the last month the traffic stands at 2,787,605 which kind of blew my mind when I added it up.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Great news about the new domains and I really like what you’ve done with SJ.co.uk

    Are you finding the traffic is organic on the free-animations.co.uk and the nineplanets.org or are you have to buy in traffic?

  2. All organic Toby through rankings, bookmarks and existing links from other sites.

    • Do you then do much SEO on the sites you buy? With the sites you run and (no doubt) contacts you have with other bloggers you could probably give a newly purchased site a huge lift in the rankings quite easily simply by linking to them. It’d be interesting to know how well Nine Planets is doing now!

  3. That’s brilliant mate, makes it all the better :-|D

    Will you be making an appearance at Think Vis next March - really could do with bending your ear about a few things - over a pint or three of course 😉

    • Would really like to, if not March then Sept but her indoors is planning a cruise next year (we didn’t really bother with a holiday this year) so will see how that pans out.

  4. Great stuff Scott. You are a multi millionaire - traffic wise. For protect.co.uk I would look at anti virus. Earnings on digital products can be awesome.

  5. Hey Scott,
    Great work! It’s really neat reading about the stuff you have going on which most people aren’t eager to share.

    Quick question if you don’t mind… You said that when you bought ceramicstoday.com it was de-listed from Google. Just out of curiosity, what did you do to get it re-listed and about how long did it take?

    Thanks,

  6. Hey Scott, thanks for sharing with us. I was taking alook at nineplanets.org and saw the bookstore section, I see you havent changed the amamzon links to affiliate links, is there a reason for this?

    • Just laziness James, will be getting round to it at some point and working on some aff relationships with telescopes & the like.

      • Scott, you should seriously think about hiring someone to help you improve on the Nineplanets.org site. It has SO MUCH potential and it is clearly not being used. If it is making +£200 per day now, I am sure that could easily double or triple with a little effort put into it. The increase should be more than enough to pay someone to do the hard work for you.

        Congrats on the 2.7m visitors. That is seriously impressive. It is 27x the traffic what I have so if you’re making 27x what I make, you really doing good :o)

        /Mikael

  7. Hi Scott,

    At 2.7 accross your network I think you are in a position to combine impressions with clicks. As I said in my comment on one of your previous post. I spoke a company the other day and they said I need to get these numbers then come back to them.

    I am still yet to break my duck on buying a good site - still not giving up though.

    If I don’t say it again this year - thanks for the help and inspiration. I am now covering my cost with a little extra to re-invest :-).

  8. When I first saw your post about the Nineplanets site I thought it was a super bold (crazy?) move, but as soon as you reported the revenue I realized you knew what you were doing, as usual :)

    I have been wanting to get into site buying for a long time now since I think I have what it takes to identify the gems. However, from some of the sites you have reported I realize I probably need to open my mind even more to the possibilities out there, as I probably would have skipped right over sites like the animations one and nineplanets.

  9. Nice to see you increasing your inventory! Looks like your doing really well. How do you find domains? Do you use some tools to find expired domains?

    Keep up the good work mate.

  10. Good work Scott. Just shows there is still good money to be made from domain names if you understand what you are doing. You should write a book. Ray

  11. Wow, this is some fantastic stuff Scott! Found you on experienced-people.net, and helped me find a great site for cheap, that is my url!

    Thanks again for sharing your knowledge for free, and wish you for another million of visitors 😛

  12. Hi Scott,

    Always love to see what you working on.
    A quick question on CeramicsToday.com
    You mentioned it was delisted in Google and you somehow get it back to service.
    Do you mind to share what have you done to get it back to Google?
    Thanks.

  13. Okay, ignore my comment.
    Just notice you already answered the same question to Wes.
    Thanks.

  14. nineplanets.org
    Has always been a personal favorite site of mine.

    I hope that you do put some effort into it, maybe reading some astronomy blogs to learn a bit about the topic.

  15. I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with catching expired domains and the best way of doing it.

  16. and forgot to say 2 million impresions a day is deffo mind blowing. If you can combine all those on just one site then that would be even more profitable - well done

  17. May I ask how do you find these domains that are expired or about to expire?. SEDO could be a place, but I doubt it since so many people already looking there.

  18. I agree with your comment about .org.uk domain names rising in value, I have noticed a similar trend. It’s all to do with supply and demand which definitely relates to domaining.

  19. Good work Scott
    Always love to see what you working on.
    Thanks.

  20. Brian Weber says:

    I just learned about Al from the WordPress Community podcast I really like your approach in buying existing domains. I also just came across another guy Travis Newman and wrote a post about him.

    I’m seriously going to look into this business model.
    Thanks

  21. Thanks for sharing about the success of your domain name purchases. There are a good number of domains out there that can make someone wealthy in a short amount of time and CeramicsToday.com sounds like a winner. Keep up the good work Scott!

  22. Great to see the planet website that you purchased seeing success. That’s a really smart strategy to contact the owners to get all the previous content, I definitely need to keep my eyes more open to try to spot deals like that. My numbers are alot smaller than yours in terms of traffic but its still fun to think about the fact that so many people have visited and see what we’ve created, thats what I love about the internet.

    Till then,

    Jean

  23. The planet website seems to be doing really well for you. You really had the right strategy going getting the old content from the previous owners. I have one site where this strategy would do well with I believe but I am having trouble locating the original owner.

  24. Like the theme on sj, is that a bespoke design or a tweaked theme?

  25. Hi Scott. Great work on grabbing these domains! I was wondering how many domains/sites you tend to run from the same IP address? Or do you just use a single IP for all your sites?

  26. Hey Scott, we need an updates! :)

  27. Hi Scott,

    An interesting article. Thanks.

    I looked at CeramicsToday because the title sounded like a monthly trade journal I used to read back in the nineties.

    If you were to contact the top 100 kiln manufacturers in the US, Europe and Asia then I’m sure that you could sign up half a dozen for bespoke advertising. These are the kilns that cost about $60k to $200k and fire tons of plates, cups, saucers, toilets and basins in one session.

  28. Hi Scott, I believe what you said about domain org.uk is true. The value of the domain is increasing. It easy to rank if it is in exact match. By the way Scott.. this blog relly need update. I miss you post - zack muar

  29. Hi Scott, Great finds 75,000 visitors is nothing to sneeze at.

  30. Would love to hear more about your recent 1 and 2 letter domains..

  31. The domain news is great as well.

  32. In your post you say that across all your sites for the last month the traffic stands at 2,787,605. How does that figure compare for, say, February 2011?

  33. This is amazing, it’s like people would abandon a building in Oxford st., London to anyone that wants to use it.
    I myself wanted to buy a domain for one of my fine jewelry stores and I was amazed to see the domain is free and was originally registered back in 2002!!!

  34. I am still yet to break my duck on buying a good site – still not giving up though.

    If I don’t say it again this year – thanks for the help and inspiration. I am now covering my cost with a little extra to re-invest :-) .

  35. 75,000 awesome… How is ceramics.com going. Do you have it at 1-2k per day instead of 700 like you anticipated?

  36. ceramic site gets just over 1000 visitors per day just now so happy enough with her

  37. Wow, Nine Planets is a PR7 site - is AdSense the only income source for this site? If I understood correctly, it will take you about 3 years at a conversion rate of 2% to recover you initial 100k investment?

    • Hi Bill, that site has paid back 50% so far but the summer will slow it down a lot so just over a year should have it repaid.

      • Wow… you’re still alive? Really been missing your posts.

        Didn’t you talk about changing the design of 9planets to improve the Adsense income? From what I can see it looks very much the same?

        /Mikael

  38. Hi Scott

    Isn’t it about time for an update from you and/or Al? :)

    Cheers, Jon

  39. :) Yep still here Mikael. Have not been that busy lately so more family time, less working. 9Planets actually had a surprisingly great CTR with what little tweaks were made so it’s something that would likely be hurt with a new design, it will get a facelift but those things are easier to do once it’s paid itself back with less risk.

    • I had a feeling that was why you didn’t change it. With the amount you paid, I would definitely choose the same route as well. Having an investment paid for itself in 12 months is still an awesome deal.

      Are you adding any new content, linkbuilding etc. or is it just sitting there being a cash cow? :)

      • It now has 2000 facebooks fans, added a couple of pages but really just a little tweak and leave it as is until the money gets paid back.

  40. Jason Goldsmith says:

    Hi Scott hope things are going great with your sites, Im curious how the Panda update has affected your network especially sites you have bought?

  41. Hi Scott,

    It seems like there are still a lot of dead links on the CeramicsToday.com site?

    /Mikael

  42. Hi Scott - would be nice to hear from you again 😉

  43. Hi Scott,

    I have a question. Are you leasing rc.co.uk or are you running a store using dropshipping or similar?

    Hope you can post an update soon.

    Thanks!

    Javier

  44. Hello Guys,

    Are you still around?

  45. Same question from me :)

  46. Hi Guys, wow its been a while since any posts on SMM. Hope that you are both ok, it would be great to hear how things are going. I’m hoping to be able to make it to the next think vis event if you gys are going.

  47. Nice update… I find it facinating with what you have done with Nineplanets… I’ve been somewhat distracted with full time job so SEO has suffered somewhat. I really need to look into Adsense. I seem to be dropping in organic search results

  48. Still no word from you guys? Hope you are all ok, would be great to hear how things are going.

  49. Hey Guys,

    No update in 2.5 years, what’s going on?

    Hope you’re all well :)

  50. Nice update, It sounds like a good way to get revenue and not spend too much money getting things in working order. Good on you!

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