Terry Didcott - Freedom Writers

Archive for the ‘Domains’ Category

In my last post Freedom Writers PR Chaos Again!, I looked at the new changes that seemed to come very early from Google with regards to Page Rank and how they affected this freedom writer and his sites. This time, I’m not going to go back into that rat’s nest of controversy, so instead I’ll get on to something that has got this freedom writers interested in subdomains again.

A while ago, I posted about the possible advantages of using a short, generic domain name to act as a base for keyword-specific subdomain names and then to set up subdomain niche sites that were tightly focused to exploit certain aspects of those niches.

Well, back then I didn’t get very far - only setting up a pretty good PayDay Loans site and creating several other niche sites but not populating them with much of anything. Time, or the lack of it was my freedom writers undoing!

Since then (and a few months have passed) I’ve had a little time to turn my attention to these neglected niche sites once again. Since I’ve been buying up expired domains, it has been painfully obvious to this freedom writers that in order to dominate any niches, I need several sites focused on each niche and there simply is not the quality of expired domain name available to do that effectively. Sure, one or two domains have come along and I’ve grabbed them, but in the main, most are rubbish and not worth the effort.

But from a freedom writers perspective, its back to the subdomain thing. Yes, they are free and the keyword is easy to place in the fully qualified subdomain.domain name. The downside is that they are not individual sites that can be sold at a later date for big profit. But if that’s not a concern and they’re really only for adding presence to any one niche where I have got a dedicated domain (or domains) with good sites set up, then its a very good idea to use them.

I’ve since updated two of my neglected subdomain niche sites with a nice template that I jigged together myself from a certain Wordpress theme and modified it to work as static web pages. Well, they not only look pretty good, but they are SEO’d to the hilt and have a great additional money making feature. I’ll explain…

A while ago, I heard about BANS sites, so I decided to find out more about what they are, from a freedom writers curiosity. Essentially, BANS is a package you buy that gives you the ability to create sites that promote niche oriented products on eBay. You get a Commission Junction account, set up an affiliate account with eBay and then promote their stuff. Anything that your site promotes that directs a buyer to the auction and they buy, you get a commission on the sale.

Its a trick I was using almost a year ago but slightly differently - this freedom writers method back then was I scanned craigslist and found the want ads and simply contacted the owners of the ads and directed them to my affiliate link to eBay where there were a selection of the item they wanted. Same result, different method.

So BANs intrigued my freedom writers curiosity. Once I figured out that BANs was simply doing what I already knew how to do, except this time you use a website to do the promoting rather than actively researching craigslist, I set about finding how I could use eBay’s affiliate program to set this up. Its was easy!

There are editor tools that you can generate a search on a particular item, say, iPods. You put in your CJ id, create links and the the editor creates a search results panel you can display on your website. It looks pretty good and all I have to do is build some content around this tool on each of my subdomain sites and I have myself some free BANs style sites!

Ha! I’m a perennial tinkerer as well as a freedom writers and when I get an idea and have the time to follow it through, it amazes me what I can sometimes achieve! Why pay for some software to do what I can already do for myself?

So the Freedom Writer’s experiment is now on. It’ll take a while for the new sites to get recognised in the SERPs, but once they get up there, it’ll be interesting to see how much traffic they get, how high Google will place them and how much commission they can make for me by just sitting there as static niche sites.

We’ll see!

Terry Didcott

Freedom writers domains to make money is another strange title, but a necessary one if I’m going to convince those nice people at Google that this blog is being written by a freedom writers and his posts are in some way involved in the world of the freedom writers! Well, it’s a start, anyway!

Domains and the make money niche are what I really want to hark on about today, or more precisely expired domains and the buying thereof. I’ve not been as busy as I was in the beginning of my new obsession with second-hand domain buying mainly because my current freedom writer’s writing gig is keeping me too busy to really get stuck into them and as a result I haven’t bought any for a while.

But I will be again soon!

As for the ones I have bought, I’m a bit stuck as to what to do with them all! Well, not exactly stuck, as I’ve put wordpress blogs on them all to get them into a live state so that Google doesn’t think they’ve been neglected. But I’m so short on time, I simply haven’t been able to fill them all up with the freedom writers  content they so desperately need to re-enter their niches and compete for the top pages in the SERPs as well as start to make money for me.

Which was the whole reason for buying them in the first place!

One site has been getting more than its fair share of the content, mainly because I know a good deal about it’s niche and can rattle off plenty of long posts and get it some keyword authority - I’m talking about my Make Money Hints blog which I shall endow with the anchor text: make money fast.

That should give it a bit of a freedom writers leg up and with all its new fresh content should help it to start to do what it’s domain was bought to do and that’s to make money!

Other domains in other niches require a fair bit of research on my part, which is tough as I don’t have that much tome to spare on them, which is why I’ve been contemplating a slightly different idea for them.

Vic at Blogger Unleashed has got me thinking along the lines of using BANS to set and forget the domains that I really haven’t got time to do much with for now, but I have also been thinking about using the already set up wordpress blogs on those sites and maybe writing some simple scripts to use the BANS idea on them without going the whole way with setting up BANS on them. Its all a case of freedom writers time constraints and what I can and can’t do with it. My train of thought seems to be leading me to think it will take me time to learn how to use BANS, whereas I already know how to use the little known eBay affiliate program to earn commission from putting people onto products on eBay’s list.

I was doing that several months ago using craigslist to promote this and it worked to a point where I was making some commissions from CJ but not enough to warrant the work I was putting in. Now BANS uses the same idea just they have site templates and scripts that do all that work for you.

So what is there to think about? Just get BANS and get on with it!

Well… I’m a freedom writers and a tinkerer by trade - I love to mess with things and see what I can do with what I’ve got which is probably why I’ve never got time for anything… Ha! I just fancy trying out this little theory of mine and seeing what happens first. Ok, if it flops, then I just get BAN, kick myself in the pants for wasting time and get on with it.

But if it works, then I’ve accomplished something and I like to accomplish things by going against the grain - a character defect I’m sure must irritate the hell out of people that know me! Some call it stubbornness! Some call it plain pig-headedness, but what the hell.

At least when I’m wrong, I admit it, learn from it, pick myself up, dust myself off and carry on!

So it’s just a bit of experimental fun for me to try this out and see where it goes and all I lose is a little time (ok and probably a little money) but if I don’t do it, then I’ll look back on my life and I’ll always wonder… why didn’t I try that little experiment with that domain when I thought of it?

I ‘ll pick a niche, a domain and a product and then set it up and see. Then I’ll report back here in, say a month to see what it did…

I like a good conundrum…

Freedom Writers
Terry Didcott

Following on from my last freedom writer post What Do Writers Write?, which was a bit of a kick in the pants for many bloggers who simply don’t know any better, here’s another thought provoking piece of freedom writer information all about expired domains that’ll get you annoyed for one reason or another!

If you haven’t already heard about another freedon writer, Vic Franqui and his over the top let it all hang out blog Blogger Unleashed, which I’m sure he’d like me to anchor as make money online (!!) then read his freedom writer blog from start to finish, then come back here.

Yep, he’s giving away a lot of hitherto unmentioned secrets on how to really make money online that all the other so called A-list bloggers and gurus have omitted to tell you about.

Why would they do that?

They don’t want any more competition, of course.

So from this Freedom Writer extraordinaire, here’s an extended spreading of some of that information that a lot of you won’t be aware of. I know I wasn’t.

That’s buying expired domains and why you should be doing it. Ok, granted you may have known about the fact that you can buy expired domains but I bet you haven’t bought any domains yourself, right?

Why would that be?

Probably because you didn’t see the potential for making a lot of money from buying expired domains. Or maybe you thought that you couldn’t afford to buy expired domains because the prices were so high or you’d have to battle it out with other more experienced Internet Marketers in a bidding war and end up paying thousands of dollars for those expired domains. Well that could happen, but it doesn’t have to if you know a bit more about it.

This here Freedom Writer does now!

So far this freedom writer has bought ten expired domains that had been allowed to expire by their previous owner for whatever reason. All but two of those expired domains cost me $5 plus a years registration. One cost $10 and the other $15. I had to outbid someone for that last one which is why it was sooooo expensive!!!

But what is this freedom writer going to get out of them?

Well for starters, expired domains are all aged, which means that whatever I do with them, either create static websites or blogs, I can start advertising and promoting straight away and I won’t get sandboxed by Google. That happens a lot with new domains and can cost you anything up to a year’s worth of lost organic search traffic. Not so with two year old or more expired domains.

The other little gem about the expired domains I bought is all but one of them came with serious Page Rank.

Ah yes, the holy grail of Internet marketers and niche marketers alike (not to mention aging freedom writers…) is good page rank which means more authority when it comes to trying to dominate any niche - a five year old PR6 site that is creatively SEO’d will stand a much better chance at getting up to page one on the Google SERPs for its keywords than a new PR0 site (or even a one year old PR3 site, for that matter) that may be SEO’d up to the hilt.

And I have five PR6 domains with verifiable back-links. I’ve also got three PR5 domains and one PR7! Think I might have some niche dominating to get on with…

Where did this freedom writer buy those expired domains?

GoDaddy Auctions. There are many more places, but as I get my domains from them anyway, I was already familiar with their site. Except I’d never ventured past the “auctions” button because I simply didn’t know. Now that I do and I’m annoyed I didn’t know this a year ago - all that freedom writer’s time was wasted on new domains sitting in the sandbox losing me money that I didn’t know I was losing!

Think about that!

Terry Didcott