AdSense for Domains Case Study

[Ron Bechdolt]

When I was an active affiliate I collected a few hundred domain names and developed nearly 100 of them. The rest have been sitting there, year after year, while I pay Big Daddy (GoDaddy) a nice little sum each month. Recently I discovered AdSense for Domains at Google and thought I would give it a try I?m finding some interesting results and thought I would pass them on to, share my experience, and see if others have similar experiences to share.

On Saturday I set up just a few domains to make sure I had all the settings right at GoDaddy. Sunday I was pleasantly surprised to see I made a couple of bucks. So, on Sunday I loaded up about 100 domains. Results were not as impressive on Monday?I made $1.00. Monday night I went in and added relevant keywords and/or keyword phrases. Come Tuesday I see I made 50 cents.

Hmmmmm, I?m working harder, putting up even more domains and getting less and less. Now, to be fair, the keywords and phrases are there to help Google find appropriate links to put on your page and I was putting up pretty top level keywords and phrases. I?m competing with marketers out there who are paying top money for good placement, right?

Okay, change in tactics required. Tuesday night I loaded up 30 pretty good domain names and did no keyword submissions. Checking my stats this morning for yesterdays results I see I have eleven sites that have made commissions, nine of which are the new ones I put up last night.

Now, what I suspect is happening (and admit I could be way off base) is Google is taking these new domains I put up and ranking them high for an initial short period just to see how they do and as none of mine has been spectacular, they get dropped down the next day. I?m going to watch these a couple of weeks and report back on the progress.

Regardless of the effort I put into this, I?m just glad these 160 domains are now doing something productive. I have bought and sold several over the years and was just about to start listing many of these for sale, but might change my mind if they pay for themselves with method. If they do well, I may get real ambitions. Anyway, stay tuned for a progress report.

If you have had similar experiences with AdSense for Domains, please chime in. This area of AdSense is all new to me so I?d enjoy hearing how others are doing. Feel free to tell my logic is skewed, too.

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

It's been a week since I posted and thought I would provide an update.

The good news is I earned over $50 in the last ten days. Not a fortune but for just throwing up some domains not knowing what to expect, I'm pleased that they earned money each and every day. Top day was $10.50. Top amount for one domain in a day was $4.00. Top earnings for one domain over the 10 day was $8.62.

Now, since I put up the 130 domains I added a several more and am up to 178. That included 17 hyphenated domains I bought yesterday and added. I did this because I noticed that some of the old hyphenated domains I owned were doing well and were very keyword rich in their name. Seeing that I did a search for a certain niche and found several dozen good two word hyphenated domain names. I bought 17 and loaded them up as an experiment. Nothing yet on those, but it is very early. I've also not set any related keywords to these domains to see if they naturally do well without any additional effort on my part. If they don't, I'll try listing some related keywords or phrases.

Originally I was suspicious that Google gave new listings some kind of preferential treatment, but having added new blocks of domains over the last week that theory does not hold water.

31 of the original 130 domains have earned money in the last 10 days. Now, if $50 every 10 days sounds good, keep in mind that I have to pay GoDaddy their registration fees (even with my bulk discount), so at the end of the year I may only be making a several hundred dollars.

Still, one has to put this all in to perspective. I was not earning any money off of these domains and they were taking up space on my server. Now they are all parked at GoDaddy and earning revenue for me. I might add, this is residual revenue, I probably won't have to touch any of them.

Still curious if anyone else out there has experimented with Adsense for Domains. Please share your experiences.

 

[ArizonaJay]

Ron, I've been following what this thread, and find it facinating - but I'm a newbie. Almost anything new and shiny will attract me!

But I'm a bit confused about what you are doing. Are YOU doing a bit of web design on these sites to place that adsense, or are you utilizing Godaddy's paid park pages to generate the income - where they set it up and you get something off the click throughs? If the latter, don't they charge a fee for that in addition to the annual registration for the domain name?

I'll also do something that I know is rude, but I hope you don't take offense. Would you be willing to share one of these sites with us so that we can all understand better what you are successfully doing with these unused domains?

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

Jeanette,

Good questions and I hope I answer them all correctly.

There are several steps here and I'll go through them in order as perhaps that better explains the process.

First, I have a few hundred domains registered at GoDaddy. Any registrar would probably work, but that is where I have mine. Other than changing the CNAME settings and the A Host records so they point to Google correctly, we are done with Godaddy.

At Google Adsense for Domains I bulk entered all 178 domains (you can bulk load 100 at a time). At this point, one could be done. Google does all the rest and sets up pages. You can change the look of your page there is you want, or identify keywords that can help Google better rank your site, but I pretty much left it alone to see how things go initially. I may experiment later.

I'd rather not show one of my sites, but I did a quick search of Google and found the following (see item #4), which shows a small image of what a page looks like when Google adsense for domains is used.

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

Okay, time for an update. Nearly a month has gone by and although the results have not been spectacular they have been encouraging. Along the way I even sold one of my domains.

I now have 204 domains listed with Adsense for Domains. Of those, 68 made an Adsense commission over the last 30 days. At the rate of income they will at the very least pay for their domain registration fees over the next year. If that is all they do I will be happy as I've been holding on to all these domain names for years (used to be an affiliate, now an affiliate manager - just hard to let good domain names go).

The next thing I want to do is compare the results of those domains that I added some helpful keywords for Google to use and those I did not.

To be honest I really want to see how they do over the long term, say three months. Then try experimenting with updating the keywords for each domains and reevaluate in another three months.

I should say, though, that there are about five of my domains that consistently make income every day with Adsense for Domains. I have no clue why those do better over others. The rest make money on a very irregular basis.

 

[DrMarie]

Thanks for sharing this Ron...very interesting. I have a few domains that I bought and never used. May give it a try.

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

I have a friend who has about six domains he put up the same time I did and his results are similar to mine, but on a much smaller scale. At the very least, if they are good domain names you should be able to use this as a way to park them and pay their registration fees each year.

 

[Affiliate Script]

Why not develop them

I can't see why you don't develop the domains into sites

Should only take a few hours for each site - then you can make more with adsense and affiliate offers

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

Most all of these domains are carry overs from when I was an active affiliate. Now that I'm an outsourced affiliate manager my time and energy is spent mostly on that. I just hated to let go so many of these domains I had collected over the last 5-6 years and hated to pay registration fees just to be hanging on to them. The Adsense for domains is a perfect solution as it will more than pays for the cost of registration and hosting.

To bring everyone up to date, of the little over 200 domains I put on there, 83 of them have made income with Adsense for Domains. Some have done rather well, others have only made a few cents. Those domains that do best are ones I up on the web with some kind of presence (sometimes just a Coming Soon page). Of the couple dozen new domain names I bought to try out, only a couple of those made any income this way and not much at that.

 

[Adammo]

This is a cool study. I've never really looked into Adsense before, but this is interesting! Would you be able to sell the domain names that are not working very well?

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

Most of them are for sale at a domain selling service. That's another reason it has been hard to get rid of them as over the years I have made a few thousand dollars selling off some of my domains.

This all leads to something I encourage everyone to do. Diversify! Don't put all your effort into one domain and hope to get rich. You may have short term success but it is a whole lot of work to keep it going. Look into all the various ways you can make money and experiment (but do so cautiously without spending a small fortune). I did not buy all these domains at once, I bought most of them over a period of several years.

 

[stevereed1968]

thanks for the information. I use adsense on my sites but hadn't really looked at adsense for domains. i have a few undeveloped domain so I 'll get it set up

 

[yakgirl]

I have two domains that I haven't yet been able to work on. Almost a month ago I set one of them up with Google Adsense for Domains, and at the rate it's going the revenue for the first month will pay for one year's registration, so I'm certainly pleased by that.

I was curious about how Google and Sedo would compare, so I parked the other domain with sedo, and I haven't seen much of anything. The keyword research I did for both of those domains suggests that the one parked with Sedo should actually do better than the one with Google, but the exact opposite is happening. In fact, the Sedo parked domain has had almost no traffic at all.

So I'm wondering if anyone here has determined through experience whether it's better to park with Google or Sedo (or some other domain parking service that I don't know about)?