Dump Those Worthless Domains
Written by Chewie on June 7, 2009 – 9:17 pmIts been a while since I have written, and I have really been busy. Since my last article, I decided to get out and get some more restructuring done with balancing life and work. Playing games online everyday gets old when your working from home. I will follow up on a future post with what I have been doing.
But for now lets go into what I think everyone should do several times a year. That involves taking the time to log into your Godaddy account or wherever you have purchased domains and make some decisions of whether domains are worth keeping. That can get pretty freakin crazy when you own hundreds of domains. I know there are guys out there that own thousands of domains with content on them. Thankfully not me. Fortunately I can say I have dropped the trash and am down to about 350 domains.
This year I dropped hundreds of domains that I just felt were not valuable anymore. They either lost their PR, or no longer served a purpose. Below are the factors I used to decide if a domain was a keeper or not.
- Does it have PR?
- Does it make me money?
- Does it have a catchy or short name that could be valuable?
- How long have I had it?
- How old is the domain, and what is the subject matter?
If you have been building your business up for the past year and have at least 100 domains I suggest you look through them and decide to either dump them by turning auto renew off, or do something with it and see what you get on the next PR update. It is possible you have a domain that is not attached to a website, and it could have live links pointing in that you just can’t see until you develop it. Whatever you do. Don’t let a domain just sit there with nothing on it. I have had some domains that I bought a year ago that I never developed come up for renewal. What a shame. But hey we live, we learn, and we make things better.
I just thought I would share, and I hope you don’t get caught like I did last month auto renewing crappy domains. It’s like throwing money away.
Posted in domains | 3 Comments »
June 9th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Good to hear from you again. I agree and have recently gone through some of mine. I have let some expire, mostly .info domains and have sold a couple of them also.
I mostly look at the PR, age and if it has made any money. Any domain that you have that can’t pay for its own renewal and privacy cost, roughly $20 isn’t worth keeping in my mind.
Hope all is well with you, hit me up on Skype sometime or email me…
Elliott
June 11th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Unless it is because I couldn’t afford them I would rather throw a WP blog on them and install e.g. the UAW plugin to autopost articles to it. It is fast and can be left untouched once done.
In a year every site could have 500-1000 articles (or more) and possibly also some PR.
I can imagine the time it’ll take if you have hundreds of “dead” domains but I’m guessing that if you have that many you’re able to afford to have someone else do it for you.
/Mikael
June 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Very good post I have dropped a couple though not many. I think it is a good idea to at least try and sale those that you don’t have the time to work with. Personally I have found it useful to use the free domains and have not noticed any draw backs yet. Though I have had a problem with getting international traffic when I cater only to US, Canada, and UK. Anyway thanks for the tips.