If you’re thinking about starting your own company and becoming a full time domain investor in 2009, here are some things you should consider:

You are going to work non-stop. Every tv show, commercial, email, shopping trip, dog walk, sporting event, night out, vacation…etc will turn in to work for you when you think about things from a domain perspective. You’ll see domain names you like and names you hate, and you’re always going to think about how it relates to your business. I put in 10-14 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week. People may comment about my travels, but even when I am on vacation, I usually work wherever I am.

Whether you are buying names to flip, buying names for PPC, or developing, there will always be current projects and things on the back-burner calling your attention. While my geowebsites have seen some pretty incredible growth, I can’t simply let them lay low. I receive emails with events and press  releases every day, and I do my best to add content to each site daily. My “breaks” consist of writing domain blog posts, testing mini site development, reading about domain news, and making domain inquiries.

You will talk to your friends about domain names until they’re sick of hearing about them. Subsequently, at least one conversation a night will revolve around someone asking you if a specific domain name is available or if a domain name would be worth some money if they register it. Most people you meet won’t understand exactly what you do, but they will either think you are a cybersquatter or a genius. Either way, most people will end up thinking you are lazy and don’t do much, which is ironic.

99% of newly registered domain names are worth what you just paid – or less. If you go all out and register hundreds of new domain names, you’ll go broke quickly. Generally, about 95% of newly registered domain names will not receive any traffic or earn any revenue if you don’t develop them. Once you realize this, you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to develop – and there’s no easy solution yet.

Although this business is lucrative, you probably will not consistently earn the same amount of money every month. There are great months and there are not so great months depending on your focus and your domain names/websites. Some months I have several great private domain sales, while other months I focus on development and don’t sell many domain names.

Overall, I love what I do and I love the freedom I have as a domain investor. I’ve been able to build 3 geodomain names into popular local websites that continue to receive increased local recognition each month, I have a domain blog that receives great commentary from people doing the same things I do, and my work doesn’t usually feel like work.

The downside is that there isn’t much easy money and your new boss will probably be much more demanding than your current boss.

I receive at least one email per day requesting a link exchange for either my blog or my other websites. People seem to think that because they added a link to one of my sites, I should automatically add one back to theirs – regardless of who they are or what their site is about. Some emails are friendly and others seem to think I would be obliged to link back, which is certainly not the case. More often than not, the link requests are for obscure websites that aren’t even relevant to any of my sites, which is more annoying than anything.

With my geodomain names, I started building links by contacting local bloggers and websites that would benefit from having a link. With Burbank.com and Lowell.com, both sites had decent pagerank when I started (Lowell.com was PR4 after my first launch and Burbank.com had been a PR4 site when I bought it). I contacted people in the area I found via Google who had equal or lower page rank and introduced myself, introduced the site, and asked for a link exchange. I felt these bloggers were either getting a better deal, or it was completely fair, and I just wanted people to see the sites.

This worked well for most commercial sites, but it did not work for city-related websites, which have some of the most trust, but have policies of not permitting outbound links on their websites to commercial sites. However, there are work arounds – like providing specific content that they want or need to link to in order to get information out to the public. In fact, my geowebsites have links from .gov and city-owned websites – whether it was intentional or not. This is the reason why good, unique content is essential! Link building works best when a site links to you because you have the best information.

One of the neatest ways I have been link building (in my opinion) is on huge websites that encourage article sharing and networking. For example, NBC Studios and Warner Bros are both located in Burbank. On the Tonight Show website (on NBC.com), and on the Ellen DeGeneres Show website, there are huge social networks, which include blogs, forums, and article postings. I signed up for accounts as Burbank.com, and I have been able (and encouraged) to post articles – which include links – on the sites.

On NBC, I posted 2 articles, which drove somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000 visits in less than a month.  On the Ellen community website, I posted a couple of articles in the past 2 days. The links in the articles are not “no follow” from what I can see, but I don’t know if it will help with my PR. Whether it does or not doesn’t matter as much as the exposure my sites are getting. The posts are geared towards travel in Burbank, and if people book hotels through the site or find restaurant coupons on the site, it ultimately helps build the brand.

Other places where I’ve posted links might not help with PR and SEO, but they do bring traffic. I have accounts for all of my fully developed websites on Twitter, and I post articles there. I also have a ShareThis button on my articles, allowing people to send links to others. Additionally, I have links on Wikipedia, which I added by signing up for an account. I know Wikipedia won’t help with the PR, but the links bring traffic.

With my blog, I have never really done any link building. I can’t recall ever asking someone to add my blog to their blogroll, and I remember how excited I was when Frank Schilling added a link to my blog. I want to provide good content that people wanted to link to, and I thought it would be tacky to ask so I never did. The only link I think I ever applied for/asked for was the DMOZ link in the domain section. Maybe this is detrimental to the SEO of my blog, but I do have a large amount of incoming links.

This information doesn’t really help anyone, but it’s my opinion on the fine line between looking tacky and trying to get some link exchanges.

With link building as with many other aspects of development, I think good content is essential. Whether you request a link or not, others will agree to link to you if they think you are going to provide their traffic with good information.

Liquid Web maintains a call center that is up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their technical support and customer service staff is knowledgeable, and they are always helpful when I call them with a question or a request. More often than not, my request is minor in nature, but the tech team is always willing to help me out and provide assistance. Whether I need an installation of a particular software library or a specific redirect that I can’t figure out, they’re able to help me quickly – and with very little hold time and no language issues.

For my somewhat limited web hosting needs, I use a Virtual Private Server, which costs around $50/month. What is a VPS? A VPS is a way of partitioning a server computer into multiple servers, each appearing to be its own individual machine rather than a shared server. The VPS manager can operate the system as if it was his own, while others share the same system. From what I understand, a VPS can help keep websites running faster, and they can also help with SEO because you manage what other sites run on your server.

Liquid Web also offers other options for domainers and others who want to have control of their hosting needs:

VPS Hosting (Linux & Windows)
Dedicated Hosting (Dedicated Servers)
Shared Web Hosting

There are a ton of standard and add-on features as well, including firewall, load balancing, e-commerce solutions and technology, Guardian Continuous Backup, Private Switch, Terabyte Backup, Remote KVM, and a whole lot of other features.

In over a year of working with Liquid Web, I can’t remember any down time on any of my sites. It’s good to work with a company that has great support and products.

There are other companies out there if you are looking for month to month web hosting providers for your web development needs.

Press Release:

Nov 17, 2008 – Portland.com today announced the launch of their newly redesigned website that provides information to visitors and residents of Portland, Oregon.  After one month of development and content building, new site offers thousands of additional pages and features.

For visitors to Portland, the new site offers information about attractions, lodging and things to do along with reviews and ratings.   “We want to provide as much information as possible to the tourist to Portland, whether they are traveling for leisure,  visiting family and friends, or for those seeking information for business travel,” said Jeremia Froyland, the Operations and Marketing Director for Portland.com.

“We believe that we owe it to the community and visitor’s to be the one-stop site for any and all information on Portland, Oregon,” Froyland noted. “With the re-launch of Portland.com, we have integrated a myriad of features that make finding information about Portland as easy as possible.  From events to business listings to community interaction, we believe we have put a world of knowledge at a visitor’s fingertips.”

In addition to providing information for tourists and visitors, the new site offers many local and community features that provide information to residents of the “City of Roses.”  Technical & Operations Director Josh Stauffer noted “We have filled the site with useful information about real estate, neighborhoods, community events and you can now find thousands of business that are located in Portland.  With many of the business listings we have not only built in features that allow ratings and reviews, but we also have uploaded descriptions, maps, hours of operation and several other features that provide a great experience for visitors to Portland.com.”

As part of the site’s effort to build and enhance the community, they are also offering free event listings, free business listings, free classified ads and the ability to post and submit your press releases for free.  Stauffer continued “We want to build and support this great city as much as we possibly can.”

Froyland added “Additionally we are very big on supporting the GeoDomain (domains that are geo-specific in nature) industry through our continued support and promotion of Associated Geos, which is a network of city, state and country sites.  By providing visitors to all of our sites with useful, helpful information, each member of Associated Geos is helping build the new frontier for local and visitor information online.

About Portland.com

http://www.Portland.com offers information for residents and visitors of Portland, Oregon on their website.  With information about hotels, real estate, news, attractions and businesses, they cater to online users who seek any information about Portland, Oregon.

Some people don’t want to have those responsibilities even though they have good domain names, and there are opportunities for geodomain development on a smaller scale. If you have a strong geodomain name (.com, .net, .info…etc) but an actual city name, I would like to recommend a few steps to launching a scaled down version of a geowebsite that will have less upfront costs, and it will be similar to what I did for Secaucus.com – which I continue to build out every day.

1) Do keyword research to see what people are looking for in the city (directions, weather, hotels, restaurants, homes…etc)
2) Contact a domain development service, find a nice free template, or create your own design template
3) Find photos of the city using a royalty-free stock photo site or Creative Commons site like Wikipedia
4) Write several articles targeting the keywords you found for your research
5) Place your articles in your template and add meta description, keywords, and titles to target those keywords and keyword variations
6) Add Adsense or other monetization option if desired
7) Add Google webmaster tools tag to your site and make sure it’s included in Google, Yahoo, MSN…etc.
Contact related websites asking for link exchanges
9) Contact local businesses offering inexpensive advertising placement

I’ve found that one of the biggest drivers to my geowebsites is mentioning local businesses. For example, if you add free listings for lawyers in the area, some people will find your site when searching for that lawyer. As I’ve been told, however, it’s much more difficult to get an advertiser to pay for a listing once they’ve received it for free. If you plan to build your site into a larger site down the road, this might not be a good option.

While I believe a fully developed site is of much more value, some smaller towns or non-touristy towns may not bring a huge return if they are fully developed. Building a mini-site can be a better option to build traffic to the site and bring a nice return – especially if you have a non-.com that wasn’t as expensive as the crown jewel .com. By adding pages daily, you are increasing the reach of your site at a convenient pace. Sometimes building a huge website can sound daunting, but if you do it slowly, it may be more rewarding.