Bronte Media

Regular readers will know of my experiment last November to register around 100 real estate related domain names (<little -town>realestate.com). People showed up to the domains when I originally parked them with services TrafficZ and Sedo but I hardly made any money.

So I changed the template (example here) and my strategy somewhat.

How is that working out? Firstly to the analytics. Sedo said I got 300 people in November to the domains, 500 in December of 07 and just 180 people in January (when I decided to change).

According to Google Analytics 362 people visited the domains in the past month.

They seem to be ranking well. Take centertonrealestate.com which is the number 2 result on Google behind Yahoo for the query ‘centerton real estate’.

But what about the moolah? The cheese? The greenbacks?

Well surprisingly the click through rates have sky-rocketed but the numbers are still so miniscule that the portfolio doesn’t make money. In fact, the click through rates have risen to 49%.

We had 39 clicks on the search the MLS link which yielded $9.80 for the month. There was also 40 clicks on the foreclosure link, but since that is a CPA deal and no one actually ended up buying a foreclosure subscription it yielded nothing. Similarly, we had 44 clicks on the mortgage lead gen page that didn’t yield a conversion.

And then there were 60 clicks on Realtors that lead back to Homethinking, which are worth something, but hard to value. Another value element, as you can see in the Google ranking of some of the domains, is the link juice passing.

So what do I need to make money? Well I need to make $2/day and instead I am making roughly $0.33 a day. So traffic would need to be roughly 1,800 per month at the current conversion rates, a six fold increase. Or alternatively, if one of those conversion offers converts then that would bring earnings up to nearly break even.

So my RPM at the moment is $27 ($9.80/(362/1000)), which sounds about right and way up from the miniscule $5 RPM I was getting from the parking companies.

Time will also give the domains to earn trust in Google (usually there is a 1 year sandbox penalty for really small sites). And then there is also other content I can add from various places to the template to help it rank better.

So all in all it’s looking like I should make the decision to at least keep some of the domains when they are up for renewal in November.

The experiment continues….