Hear the author out; he has a valid point.

The headline is inflammatory, but they aren’t my words. They’re those of Matthew Mayer. And before you call him an idot, you should understand the context.

Mayer wrote an excellent piece about what ails Live Current Media (see previous article). In it he writes:

[Live Current] owns a bunch of domain names. That’s it. They sell product through one of them, and have been trying to develop others. Unfortunately, it’s a flawed business model. Domain names have no intrinsic value. They only have value if they are developed and monetized, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

Of you and I know that domain names have intrinsic value. But in Live Current’s case, it’s not earning much from domain parking any more. It has tried for several years to make the leap to domain development, and that’s where the trouble started. Live Current has had a devil of a time trying to develop.

It entered into an agreement to pay $60,000 per month plus a profit share to develop web sites that look like this.

It struggles to scratch a few dollars from its developed Perfume.com each month.

It developed (and now parks) Body.com.

It entered into an agreement to pay $50 million over ten years to DLF Indian Premier cricket League, and has no way to pay it.

Although domain names do have intrinsic value, that doesn’t mean someone who owns good domain names can develop them. The CEO of Live Current confesses he doesn’t no squat about cricket. My guess is few people at the company know anything about cricket. How can you bet multiple times your market cap on something you aren’t passionate about? Oh yeah, it’s because the company happened to own Cricket.com. (Which, by the way, is not part of the $50 million agreement).

There’s a lesson in this for all domainers. Developing web sites is like developing businesses. It’s hard. Most will fail. And great domains don’t guarantee success.

Simple user review site creation develops domain names fast.

These days every one is trying to develop their domains. But it’s easier said than done. My experience with ParkingJudge.com and RegistrarJudge.com shows that you can develop dynamic, user-generated content sites with little programming skills.

Here’s something that may surprise you. Both of these sites were developed using blogging software WordPress. On top of WordPress, I used a simple plugin called WPReviewSite. WPReviewSite turns WordPress into a dynamic review site for whatever topic your domain is about.

Since you can count on visitors to contribute much of the content, the plugin lets you get a web site started and then let it grow over time. You can generate revenue by placing ads and by inserting affiliate links into the reviews.

Yes, you’ll need to promote your review site and monitor reviews, but it’s a great foundation for building a domain into a site that someone will want to visit again; not some fluffy content site designed to attract one-time visitors.

There are a number of types of domains that WPReviewSite will work well for, including:

-Product centric keywords, such as computers, cars, and books
-Services, such as web hosting companies and logo design
-Geo domains, such as CityRestaurants.com, where you let visitors review restaurants

I’d rather not see a bunch of people duplicate my efforts at ParkingJudge and RegistrarJudge, but there are many opportunities to apply WPReviewSite to various verticals.

Having installed and used the plugin on two sites now, I feel comfortable recommending it. WPReviewSite costs $97 to use on one web site or $199 to use on unlimited web sites.

Leonard Holmes of ParkQuick details the trials and tribulations of domain development.

by Leonard Holmes

Are you getting tired of parking domains? Are you serious about developing?

For the past 12 months I have been paying $800 a month to an educational organization to learn web development, Internet marketing, and SEO. This is a lot of money, and I ask myself every few months whether it is really worth it. So far I have decided that it is. Stompernet has been closed to new members since May of 2007. It is opening its doors again this coming week, but probably for just few days. It seems that people beat the door down to pay this much money for this kind of training.

They are also offering No-cost tools to assist webmasters and domain developers. Their most recent offering – Stomper Site Seer – is a web-based tool that you don’t have to pay for. It generates a lot of information about your site in one report. Even if you don’t sign-up for Stompernet (and most people won’t) their free educational offerings are amazing. This is stuff that you’d pay a lot for elsewhere. By giving away some of their material they hope to get people to sign-up. I plan to stay a member.

One major component of Stompernet is SEO. They provide unsurpassed training to help you rank in Google. Using these techniques I have been able to consistently rank on the first page of Google for the term “Domain Parking.” There is also a lot of training on building Online storefronts using affiliate links or drop-shipping. Some stompers have built multi-million dollar businesses from the techniques they learned (and others have struggled because of the sheer volume of information available). Faculty members include Jerry West, Howie Schwartz, Andy Jenkins, Andy Edmonds, Dan Thies, Brad Fallan, Dave Taylor, David Bullock, Don Crowther, Leslie Rhodie, Sherman Hu, Mike Stewart, Paul Colligan, and Ed Dale.

Stompernet includes professional coaching and face-to-face conferences several times a year (at no extra charge). The conferences usually last for three days on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The last few have been in Atlanta. I attended the last two and found them to be at least as valuable as T.R.A.F.F.I.C. or Domain Roundtable, but with a different emphasis. Many of the attendees are small business owners with mediocre domains. They learn from people like Brad Fallon, who makes millions every year with the site MyWeddingFavors.com.

The video that you view at the site has a playlist button that will allow you to view all other free videos, such as their Going Natural 3 – Video 1. This video will teach you how to design an AdWords campaign, using a real-world example that occurred when Google dropped an ecommerce site from their rankings.

When you finish reading this, go check out the video and try their tool on one of your developed or semi-developed domains. Stompernet will probably be closed again by the time the June NameMonetizer newsletter comes out, so I want DomainNameWire readers to at least have a chance at this training.

Leonard Holmes

Want to develop your domains? Here’s a solution that even non-techies will appreciate.

[Editor's note: this is an updated version of an article originally posted March 6, 2006] Domain parking got you down? Worried about the Snowe Bill and what it may do to your undeveloped domains? Killed by the death of parking arbitrage?

It seems most people in the domain industry are finally getting on the development bandwagon. This article discusses a simple way for even non-techies to develop their domains. The upside is more revenue and better protection for your domains, which will now be used for a legitimate business purpose.

The solution, XsitePro, lets you quickly create good sites for domain names that result in large ad revenue increases – often 10 or 20 times that of a parking page.

But this software isn’t like the myriad of other applications that generate thousands of junk web pages to attract search engine spiders. Instead, it’s web design software created for internet marketers and domain name owners. It allows you to rapidly create search-engine optimized web sites for your domains and publish them with little hassle. You don’t need to know the slightest about HTML to use XSitePro, although advanced users can add HTML elements to their web sites.

Here’s how I use XsitePro. First, I pick a parked domain name in my portfolio that gets a modest amount of traffic but has low earnings. I then create a simple site in XSitePro. It takes a few minutes to set up the framework for the site including all meta tags, affiliate links, etc. I then add a few pages of content. XSitePro automatically organizes the pages, creates a site map, and adds navigation structure. The software makes it very easy to add your Google Adsense code into all pages automatically. Then you click a button and upload your site.

Total time to design, add content, and upload sites: about 1-2 hours.

Take a typical domain that makes $1 a day. With an XSitePro site that gets traction in search engines I can make about $5-$10 a day with Google Ads. In one month, that’s a difference of $120-$270 per month. Extrapolate this out over a year and the time you spent on the site is well worth it. One of my best performing sites made $1 a day as a parked domain and now makes an average of $15 per day as a mini web site.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of XsitePro. You can invest some time this week developing web sites and reap the benefits for years to come. This software pays for itself several times over — it has for me for the past three years.