I have never been very successful with affiliate offers on my websites, but there are plenty of people that use companies like ClickBank and LinkShare to make a whole lot of money. I am confident saying that there are many young millionaires in that area of Internet marketing.
One thing I am also fairly certain of is that many affiliate managers and companies that run affiliate programs tend to think of domain names differently. Take a look through the ClickBank marketplace for example, and see some of the domain names used by affiliate offers.
Many of these domain names are pretty poor (to say the least), but they get the job done. My feeling is that perhaps they could close more sales with a better descriptive domain name because it would have a higher level of trust. What would you trust more – a name like SciaticaTreatment.com or FixYourSciaticaBackPainNow.com? More likely the first, but I digress. In addition to trust, they may also be easier to rank for the keywords, with all things being equal.
That being said, perhaps you can target the companies making these affiliate offers the next time you are looking to sell a good descriptive domain name. Perhaps you can do Whois lookups on these less than stellar domain names, contact those registrants, and pitch your name as an alternative.
I know that many of these people won’t be interested – they do the job with their hand registered domain names and many make good bank. However, someone may see the opportunity in owning a good descriptive domain name at a fair price and jump on it. I think it’s worth a shot and can’t hurt to ask.
At the very least, perhaps you can find some good affiliate offers to promote on your domain name if you end up keeping it.
Great post! I have also used clickbank and others but never maid anything very profitable.I have started to look for good domain name and maybe then i will get some affiliate profit showing those ads, It seems that clickbank does the advertising for these affiliate link sites. Their domain names are funny sometimes but the add and clickbank does the job…but good domain name would be more attractive to get real buyers.
I have sold a few names to companies like this. One was even my biggest sale! Its always a great idea to reach out to them.
Brian
The best way to make money is selling display ads directly to advertisers on long term campaigns.
@ Kevin
That’s a good way for consistent revenue, but flipping names is still where I make the biggest returns and revenue.
Interesting. Thanks
I like to reverse engineeer, I find a good affiliate product on bladder infections and then I go get the name bladderinfections.ca and point it over to the affiliate product. It makes a few sales a week, multiply that by a few hundred targeted domains and its a good revenue stream. Find the product then buy the domain.
When buying domain names, there are sites that have a list of domain names that they’re about to acquire as well as the asking price for each one. For strong domain names, you can have yourself wait listed so that you’ll be the first to get a domain name when it becomes available. You can also have domain names reserved for a fee.