I bought an expired 5 letter dot com about a year ago. Unfortunately it’s not a dictionary word, otherwise I’d probably be retired in the tropics by now. However it is something that’s easy to remember and therefore brandable.
Since I bought it I’ve been pondering what to do with it. I initially set up Wordpress Mu on it, thinking that I could set up a lot of blogs with subdomains on it. I only installed Wordpress Mu to see what it could do, I set up a couple of blogs with it and then forgot about it for a couple of months.
When I went back to see what was happening with it, I found that 50 odd blogs had been set up on it. I took a look at them and found out they were all spamish type sites with lots of links pointing to other sites. I wasn’t really keen on this but the search engines were picking up the spam blogs and sending traffic.
As it wasn’t costing me any extra I let this ride for a couple of months. Then I started getting adult sites setting up spam blogs with content that I wasn’t comfortable living with.
So I needed to take the blogs down, but as I knew it was getting traffic to the site, I didn’t want to let leave it empty.
It was a short domain so I came up with the idea of setting up a URL redirection service.
I downloaded a free script from hotscripts.com and set it up and the site and promptly forgot about it.
Today I took a look at my site stats for July. I’ve had over 40,000 hits through the redirection service. I took a look at the database for the site and found that only 36 people have set up URL redirections, but yet the traffic they are pushing through my site is about 5 times what all my sites combined receive.
I think this one may have a future, will need to do some programming (or pay someone to do it) but I think once it’s properly set up it’s something that will be a stress free money maker.
Post a Comment