My clearout of domains and websites is almost complete, so I thought I would write a post about what I have leart while clearing out my old portfolio.

1) Just because you thought it was a great domain, doesnt mean it is! I have a few domains which I thought were great domains that I could develop, or just sell on and make a decent profit on. However, after listing them several times on Digital Point it has become clear that not everyone has the same opinions of what makes a good domain. Needless to say, it works the other way as well. I had a couple of domains I was expecting to just let expire, s0 when I was offered $50 (about £30) for one of them I snapped their hand off!

2) Timewasters are… a waste of time. I sold a couple of websites/domains to users, who then refused to reply to emails/pm’s. I even made the mistake of even turning down an offer from a different user while waiting for a timewaster to reply. After the first two timewasters I decided if the user didnt get in touch within 24 hours I would sell the website to someone else.

3) Sell to a trustworthy seller. I had an offer of $1000 for one of my sites, however there was something very strange about the buyer. Wasnt interested in seeing proof of earnings, he had different names/usernames/emails for Digital Point/GoDaddy/Escrow. When I asked him about it, he insisted it was because he was in the forces and didnt want them to find out what he was doing online – which seemed even stranger. Anyway, I stopped the sale and held onto the site for another couple of months and eventually sold it to a reputable seller (he had already bought one of my cheaper sites), for 20% less than the original offer – but I had the money in my account within 10 minutes of agreeing the sale and everything went as smooth as possible! It might not always be the best offer, but I would personally rather take a guaranteed $800 over a possible $1000 any day.

Overall I am quite pleased with how easy it was to clear out the domains, and how much I actually made.  I have sold 14 domains/sites so far which cost me approximately $60. I wasnt hoping to make much profit, enough to cover a years decent hosting (£100/$160), in total from all of the sites/domains I sold, I ended up with about $1500 in my PayPal account – almost 10 times what I wanted and I still have another 3 or 4 undeveloped names to clear out.

Just a brief update on how things are going in the affiliate marketing world for me. Firstly some of my small sites have been making sales (one which is a couple of months old and has never made a sale, made 5 sales within 2 day last week!), not much but they have been keeping me out of those horrible “no sale” days.

I got accepted for the Woolworths affiliate over the weekend so I have started loading the site with products, although I need to take a look at the database and see if there is any quicker way of getting all the products on. Im confident enough I can write a PHP script which will take the product feed and update any price changes and create a list of any new/deleted products – but putting 1100+ products into wordpress manually is a bit time consuming so need to get this automated if possible. The first week I wrote my 2 articles for the site as planned, but then last week I didnt do any so I need to get back into that and possibly write 3 for the next 2 weeks to catch me up.

My video game website is doing well and for the last week has been making a sale most days, which isnt bad considering its only receiving 10-15 uniques per day. I need to give the site a revamp and add a blog section to hopefully bring in a bit more search engine traffic (most is direct or referred from facebook at the minute). I could also do with building up the facebook fans, so I’ll be doing a bit of research on that when I get chance.

I also need to work on building backlinks. I have quite a few sites which are currently sitting at middle/bottom of the first page and I think with a few decent backlinks I could shift up to the top half of the page. Although this should be covered in the “Advanced Search Engine Optimisation” course which Im going to in a few weeks.

Im also going to try and sell my last non affiliate marketing website on either Digital Point or Flippa. The last one is my big site, although it only makes cash when I post really and as its mainly US traffic its difficult for me to post many deals (mainly due to the time difference). I had originally hoped for $1000 (£600), which is about 10 months earnings but Im now expecting to let it go for a bit less as I just want to get rid of it now.

I’ll update again when I have something interesting!