Internet Gangsters

One of my biggest money making websites had been on a “.info” domain for over a year and was pulling a fair amount of money. I know that “.info” domains are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to quality and they are usually picked up by spammers for cheap. When I initially started the website I didn’t anticipate the amount of revenue I could generate with it and therefore didn’t want to spend the extra money on a “.com”. This was a big mistake!

A dot com domain costs anywhere from $6-10 per year, depending on what GoDaddy promo codes you can dig up, where a dot info domain runs you $1.99 per year. I was trying to save money but had I known that meager $4-8 for the year would have had me pulling in much more money I would have done it right the first time.

Earlier this month I decided it was time for this .info site to get a makeover and a new domain. It was starting to become cluttered with ads that didn’t need to be there, information that nobody clicked on and so forth, plus it was out of season and I wasn’t making a lot of money. First thing I did was secured a brand new .com domain for the website, making sure to use a good keyword. After that was secured, I got a different layout going and setup everything how I wanted. I did a few tests to make sure everything was going well and setup all the plugins and other stuff I needed. Everything was done, I switched the RSS subscribers over the new site, the twitter feed, all I needed to do was make a post on the old site letting people know that we’ve moved and then start updating the new site instead.

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been making much money on this site over the summer, it’s off season for this niche. As soon as I turned on the new site and started making posts there I was getting a ton more visitors than I normally had gotten. I was coming up way higher in SERPs and getting more click throughs which in turn was generating more revenue. I also had more people signing up as followers on twitter and subscribers to my RSS feed. I was certainly happy with the way things were looking.

It’s been about 13 days since I’ve launched the new look/domain and I’ve made more this month than I did all summer. I can’t put a finger on exactly what caused the massive change in visitors, but I’m pretty confident it has to do with the the SEO tactics I’ve implemented as well as the dot com domain. People seem to trust a .com more than a .info. The site is also not cluttered with ads anymore, although there are still a few minor issues I have to fix. Overall I’m amazed at the turnaround of the site over the past few weeks and it seems as though it’s not slowing down.

So my advice to you is if you’re going to start up a website and are debating between a .info and a .com due to the cheaper price, I would always go with the .com (.net if you absolutely have to). Just from my personal experience this month I can tell you that you will regret it if you go with the lesser of the two.

I’ve bought quite a few domains over the years, a lot of which just sit and do nothing. I may have had a good idea at one point and bought a domain in anticipation of creating a new site, only to forget all about it or realize that the idea might not have been so great. So this little write-up is more of a guide on how to get a good domain name, where to buy them and other domain questions.

So you have an idea for a site geared towards making money. The topic of the site isn’t necessarily “Making Money” but your main purpose for creating the site is to make money through displaying ads somehow. Now one of the best ways to get people to your site right from the start is to buy a domain that someone already owns or that a site is already created on. And by this I mean you find a site that someone may be selling on one of the many web marketing forums out there, that the person just has no use for anymore, or didn’t do what they wanted with. It’s going to cost you more than it would if you registered the domain yourself, but if the domain has been around longer it helps with SEO (search engine optimization). Google and other search engines sometimes look down on sites that are strictly looking to make money and have just started up. Now this isn’t always the case though, if you have legitimate content on your site and people like reading it then you should be ok with SEO from the start, that’s not saying you are going to be #1 in google from day 1, that takes work and another write-up. So click below to check out some tips for buying domain names.

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