Saturday, August 19, 2006

Monetizing Domains in the Home Schooling

Like many compulsives or impulsives, I seem to accumulate alot of domains. Each great business and marketing idea seems to lead to me rapidly registering new domains (often in the dead of night). In some cases, I have actually created the site but in about 90% of the cases, I have registered a domain and not yet done much with it.

I'm often surprised when I look at my list of domains: "What crazy idea did I have when I actually signed up for www.somethingodd.com"?

So, rather than leave these domains idle, I am looking for help on what best to do with these domains (I've tried ignoring them but they haunt me).

Also, since I host and register in a number of places (I have a bad case of the deal-of-the-month) and I don't have the expertise to forward or to properly redirect, I end up with weird Kludges.

Weird Kludges - For instance, the only way that I have found to direct a domain (registered at namebargain) to a page at Time4Learning (registered at registersite.com, now misk.com and hosted at webstream.net) is to set the dns to trafficclub which allows me to select the page to redirect the domain to. I suspect the search engines don't like this combination but its the best I can do until I get a techie to work with me.

Here are the four strategies that I have come up with along with my thoughts on how to measure them.

1. Monetize domains with some appropriate algorithm-based pages and advertisements. Most of my unused domains seem to get populated by a set of pages with ads and affiliate links and link pages where are making money for someone (the registrar?). After much inquiring, I found a way to set this up myself. So in a few minutes, I registered the following domains onto trafficclub.com. Anybody have a better idea?
Florida Home School florida-home-school.com
California Home School california-home-school.com
Gifted Child gifted-child.com
Gifted Student gifted-student.org
I set these up earlier today so we'll see how they do ($1/day? $10/day? $100/day?).

2. Redirect the domains to relevant pages on the site that I most care about. Here for example:
Californiavirtualacadmy.com California Virtual Academy - goes to T4L CA page
Florida Home School florida-home-school.org - goes to T4L FL page
Gifted-Child.org Gifted Child - goes to T4L gifted page
Gifted-Student.com Gifted Student - goes to T4L gifted page
Home School Online Home-School-Online.com - goes to homeschoolonline.org
Home School Resource Home-School-Resource.com - goes to T4L homeschool resource page
I guess if traffic comes in from these domains on my monthly stats, I'll know that its helping. And if google or yahoo counts them as links, then they weigh in a bit.

3. Put up a tiny original website with a few relevant links. Examples...
Time For Learning Timeforlearning.com
Home School Curriculum Review Homeschool-Curriculum-Review.com
Learning Games for Kids LearningGamesForKids.com PR4
To measure this, I should set up a few this weekend and endow them with the example same links so it'll be an apples to apples comparison. These others have been up for awhile and have some decent page rank on their own.

4. Or just redirect the whole domain to another:
http://www.Time4Math.com PR2
http://www.Time4Reading.com
Again, these are old and new ones should be set up to measure. These sites do direct traffic (in the hundreds per month, not thousands) and do have some page rank.

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