Very insightful article.

I agree with you on your prediction for 2009, however, with that said, I still think a very important point is being over looked.

The key to domain development is go further than creating mini-sites or large content websites.

Instead, domain developers should be approaching domain development in the same manner regular business ideas are approached.

Think of real business concepts outside of ppc, affiliate marketing or any other type of similar monetization.

Build it like a real business and operate it like one.

This means that you might only be able to approach one or two good domain development projects per year.

That’s ok

I truly believe the winners in the domain development game will be the ones that shift their perception of what has been described as domain development, to a view of creating real business concepts on top of their domains.

Keep the good content coming E!

Having said that, I do highly recommend domainers to get their feet wet in developing websites. I don’t AT ALL recommend anyone get into the low quality type of website development. Whether it’s a poor quality design, or nearly unreadable content, I see time and again domainers throwing away money with these sub-par development companies. Just don’t do it. Take the time, or make the investment, in developing a high quality site. One that you’d be proud to own. Then, invest in promoting the site so actual people come to visit it. If you’re budget is so low you can only afford crap, take the time to do it yourself. If you don’t have either time or money, just keep the domains parked, or sell them.

It’s been fairly obvious that development is the way forward since PPC rev started dropping a few years ago, I think Google is probably one of the highest paying anyway at the moment and probably still will be in years to come..

What you didn’t cover was the fact that if you aren’t putting at least SOME relevant content on your domains, and you’re leaving them to rot on some parking service with landing pages of adlinks, your domains won’t build ANY value at all. SE’s do NOT index landing pages. Period.

If you don’t have a typein domain, longtailed or not, but it’s a generic brand niche domain you believe in, then you ABSOLUTELY NEED to have relevant content on the domain to get a chance for SE indexing. Once your domain is indexed on a search engine, the domain value doubles, at the minimum.

So, most domainers in 2009 will make the decision: “Do I try to sell my domains I can’t afford to hire web design teams to develop, or do I just let them expire, or do I spend a one-time fee of $.99 per domain at Whypark.com to at least get RSS and other content feeds on them to establish their existence and indexing by search engines, thereby increasing their resale value?

If a domainer has a list of domains they believe in, but they can’t monetize them through parking services (which are based on typein and backlinks), then the domainer needs to make the decision to keep, sell or release those domains. If you have 1000 domains that aren’t making money at a parking service, then sign up for a discounted bulk account at Whypark, where you can get all your domains parked with relevant current content for less than a dollar per domain.

After you do that, you can follow your domains’ performance, and decide to invest a few dollars more into the domains you see showing promise. I think your readers would be amazed at how little it costs to build out nice-looking, content-rich websites if they knew where to go.

Cheers!

Stephen Douglas