Have you given serious thought to developing your domains? Domain development is what I’ve been doing lately – developing this domain blog into a website and learning as much as I can about domain development. Developing your domains doesn’t have to be hard. There are many different ways to develop domains – I’ll cover a few ways to develop domains in this post and will provide additional domain development tips in a future post.

I don’t see many people buying domains the way they used to. If you’re not buying domains and you’re not selling domains, what are you doing with your time? I’m doing some domain brokering, helping one domain investor sell some of his ccTLD domains, and spending time improving my domain development skills. How much money could I save by developing my own domains instead of paying hundreds/thousands (depending on the domain development requirements) per domain getting someone to develop my domain for me?

The great thing about domain development today is that plenty of domain development software is available to assist web developers of all skill levels. It’s hard to get through to many domain name investors about why development really is the way to go — many will say they’re domainers, not webmasters. How many people can afford to be pure domainers nowadays? Domain parking had many people in the past saying their domains would make more parked than developed – few domains would make more parked than developed today. Think about whether you could make more by having your domains developed.

Pure domaining is a pipe dream for most new domainers today. Today, it takes money to make money in the domain business. Sure, you can make a little money domaining, however I don’t see many new domainers making a living off new domain registrations or by flipping domains unless they came in with a large bankroll.  A quick look over at the domain appraisal section of any domain forum will give you a pretty good idea of the abilities of a new domain investor to find and register good domains.

Domain Development: Free or Paid?

Domain development for many focuses on trying to optimize their domains for the keywords getting the most searches, not realizing the competition they face in ranking well for these top keywords. Rethink domain development if your domain development strategy revolves ranking well for highly competitive keywords.Domain development isn’t about getting the most traffic — if that’s all domain development were, we’d just just buy one of those cheap website traffic packages. What we’re looking for when developing domains is quality traffic — domain traffic which will convert into sales. I’ve often talked about niche domains on this blog — what we’re talking about here essentially amounts to niche keywords. By targeting something more specific (or niche), we’re reducing the amount of keyword competition and hence, the difficulty in ranking well for the keyword. The only way to go about developing your domains is by targeting long tail keywords. Many domain investors have the desire to develop their domains, however just because domain development no longer requires being a webmaster does not mean domain development will be right for you. Before you decide to dedicate any part of your domain monetization strategy to domain development, do yourself a favor and develop a few domains. Developing domains takes a lot of time and there’s usually a lot of upkeep involved. If you plan on hiring article writers or making use of advertising and marketing services, be aware of the costs. Make sure domain development is still a better option than the alternatives after all costs have been accounted for. You’ll also need to carefully consider what platform to use for developing your domains — Whypark, Noomle, Wordpress, another CMS, or perhaps a premium domain development solution, such as the domain development services provided by AEIOU.com, DomainMassDevelopment.com, MiniSites.com, and SiteGraduate.com. If you do choose to use one of these premium domain development services, it’s all the more important that you sit down and figure out how you’re going to make that money back. Domain development can be done in Wordpress or in something custom designed. You might very well use a combination of free and paid domain development, saving your best domains or the domains you think have the best domain monetization potential for paid domain development.

Good Domain Development

Plenty of domainers, webmasters, and SEO consultants will tell you that the search engine traffic you receive could be one Google algorithm change away from disappearing, so don’t just write for SEO. Outsourcing is cheap enough nowadays that even if I wanted something more than a cheap website, it really wouldn’t break the bank to have someone else take care of any domain development I’m unable to do myself. Looking at the price of a premium web design suite compared to what you’re going to pay per minisite if someone else is going to be developing your domains for you, the choice was pretty simple for me on which way to go.  When developing domains, think about how to maximize the value of your time. Time spent developing domains might break down as follows: 50% of time spent developing good content, 25% spent developing excellent content, and 25% spent on link building and SEO.

Domain Development Strategies

You really have 3 ways to to start developing your domains: Develop your domains into hundreds of small minisites, develop your domains into websites, and/or develop some some domains into minisites and other domains into websites. Without getting into how many websites you’ll be competing against, my personal thoughts on the matter are to ask yourself what you’d like to do. Personally, I like short domains — I enjoy talking about short domains both on Namepros and on this site, so it was only natural for me to want to develop LLLL.com into something more than a minisite. If you have domains in your portfolio which cater to what you’re interested in, it’ll be a whole lot easier to spend the necessary time properly developing them compared to domains you have no interest in and hence, likely no interest in developing. Minisites are quick, easy, and don’t need anywhere near the amount of maintenance a website or high traffic blog is going to need to succeed. What turns out to be the best option for you might not just depend on your like or dislike for the subject your domain name caters to, but also to the size of your niche. There’s no way I could consistently write about only short domains on a daily basis. Looking at blogs which are updated daily, most of them have something in common – they have many or very broad topics.

Domain Development: Reality

If you’re still not sold on domain development, I really don’t know what else to say..  Even if you’re not a short domain name investor and even if your keyword domains are making a satisfactory amount of money, why not try for more? What do you have to lose by giving domain development a try on a couple sites and see if it produces better results than parking or otherwise making use of your domains? It was just announced a couple days ago that Parked.com bought Whypark and with earnings from developed minisites reported to be up to 10 times higher, that might be something worth looking into.

My favorite domaining quote is something said by the Domain King: “You don’t make a million dollars. You make a dollar, 1 million times.”  That’s probably more true than intended if you’ve developed hundreds of minisites, however no matter how you go about your domain development, it’s pretty clear that you need to make $1 before you can make $2. Finds something that works for you and repeat it — over and over again.

For all the risks domainers have taken in years past investing in domains and domain name segments whose futures were uncertain, it’s somewhat surprising how safe most like to play it when it comes to domain name development. Live a little, take a risk.

Why not have the best of both worlds – great domains developed to capitalize as much as possible on the direct navigation traffic your domains already receive? Not happy with the amount of traffic/revenue your domains are receiving — are prepared to put in a little work to reach your goals? We can talk all we want about successful domainers, but the bottom line is that no pure domainer ever has or ever will make remotely close to what the best web developers are making.

Like anything else on the Internet, do your research before choosing a domain development service provider.

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2. Cheap Minisite Development
3. Minisite Development