The Marketing Technology Blog

This week I received Business 2.0 and FastCompany in the mail. While I was catching up with Pat Coyle, we were discussing a great article in Business 2.0. During our discussion, we had a chuckle that FastCompany seemed to be going downhill fast. It seems 1/2 the magazine is ads, and the other 1/2 is very small articles on pages with very large photos. I’m not sure what they are trying to do, but it sucks. I’ve been reading FastCompany ever since its inception. It used to be ‘the’ Dot Com resource. Recently, though, it has a little bit about nothing and a lot of big artsy photos to back up that nothing. I don’t buy business magazines to look at the pictures.

Meanwhile, Business 2.0 really seems to be taking off. This month there was a fantastic article on ‘domainers’. In the old days, folks used to sit on domain names and then make a mint selling them off. I actually did this myself, selling HelpingHand.com for a significant sum of money about 4 years ago. The new model is to keep a domain like that and then utilize affiliate marketing to make a mint. It seems many people simply type a domain in to see what comes up. Example: if I want to look for a pay raise calculator, I would just type in http://www.payraisecalculator.com. The links on Payraise Calculator can actually bring in more money than selling the domain name outright. And once the money starts rolling, other companies take interest and purchase the site outright to have access to the eyeballs. It seems that the average price is $38/visitor.

I’m going to put the article to the test! I have a couple domains laying around that I’ve not done anything with but I’m going to…. http://www.payraisecalculator.com, http://www.navyvets.com, and http://www.reachindy.com are a few. I’m on vacation today so I just applied for a buttload of affiliate programs with different advertisers. Then I’m going to put some money into getting in some Search Engines. I’ll keep you posted!

PayraiseCalculator.com gets about 5,000 unique hits per month with about 900 new users per month. My peak was about 20,000 hits when the tool was listed in USA Today. At that rate, I should be able to sell it for about $400,000. Any takers?