The SEO prodigy strikes again! When it comes to figuring out how things should work in a site for it to provide revenue, Charles Floate is one of the best people to do it. His growth blueprints are always on point and provide a clear perspective as to what you could do with a domain for it to return on your investment.
This April, Charles selected four domains from the Education, Design, Entertainment, and Tech niches. You can check out his fresh ideas and straightforward advice below.
University-Bound.com
With all of 13 years of it’s domain age still intact, almost all of it’s backlinks at the homepage, a fairly generic brand name and a niche with high RPMs, majority tier 1 countries and an original purpose that can be repurposed a number of ways then this domain is absolute gold.
I would use it for a programmatic build to generate traffic based on universities across the US, Canada, UK and Europe, with the main monetization via display ads.
Education and online education was the 2nd highest RPM category (After insurance) in the U.S. in 2022 with SEMRush citing an average CPC of over $12 in the space and in the UK alone, combined monthly search volumes for all variants of “university” exceeded 40 million.
And even if you don’t have the expertise to develop a programmatic site, the domain has plenty of room to be a content site for those students who are just starting out and looking for information on everything from which school to go to, where to live nearby, what food to eat, how to save money/budget, how to make money, what clubs to join, the history of the school and many, many more things to cover too.
GFXMaker.com
This isn’t just a domain, but you’ll be getting a full niche site on top with over 100 indexed posts, an upward traffic trajectory closing in on 10,000 visitors per month and a brand name that is perfect for the current A.I. crazed world we’re living in.
There are two different paths I would go down with this domain, the first, and by far the most profitable, would be building a SaaS (Software-as-a-Subscription) based on existing technologies so the development cost (or timeframe, if you can do it yourself) would be much smaller than your traditional custom development project.
The second path you could take would be continuing on with the development of a niche site that promotes various graphic design related offers such as software, fonts, plugins, addons or even the hardware that designers are using. And last year, Adobe launched their own affiliate program, which means you can now promote their entire tool suite with an 85% first month commission then a recurring (lifetime) 8.33% commission that can be increased once you hit specific goals and are assigned an affiliate manager.
The reason I would still go down the first path is that valuations for SaaS businesses are currently sitting at 50x – 72x monthly multipliers, whilst affiliate sites are at recent lows of around 30x – 32x and with how easy it is to deploy new SaaS businesses based on APIs or even with all of the no-code solutions these days, it shouldn’t cost more than the price of this site/domain to build it. All you need is to hit $1k MRR for 6 months, and you’ve made a return on investment based on the valuation of the business alone.
The original domain was used by a small graphic design company to solicit jobs for everything from logos to YouTube banners and whilst the domain hasn’t got its full age from it’s original purpose, it’s clearly indexing fast and high for a lot of related terms which means Google still appreciates the domain and it’s even recently been attracting natural, relevant links as well.
ALL of the original links go to the homepage with branded anchor text, so you won’t need to worry about repurposing or rebuilding around the entity either.
HistorySpaces.com
Since the pandemic’s tail end, the tourism industry has been booming! I’ve gotten more link buy request emails from the travel space over the first few months of this year than I did in the past 5 combined.
Mix that with an evergreen niche of locations that don’t really change that much, and will have a continual flow of new interest and you have hit a niche that is prime for takeover.
This domain has all of its age, and it also has some fairly decent wayback machine posts that could be immediately re-posted and then updated to rank again, including some posts with relevant high DR sites and even .edu universities covering the topics too.
I would look at building out an informational affiliate site that promotes locations, tours and accommodation nearby for those looking to go on the hunt for historical sites which has a serious lack of content and you can monetize with a service like FareHarbor which gives you a 15% cut of their 20% booking fee across 50,000+ tours and activities which includes most major historical sites in the US and Europe.
PhoneReport.info
Despite the name, this domain was a blog covering everything in the mobile phone world and has attracted backlinks from all corners of the tech world, though mainly at inner post URLs.
As the domain has kept it’s 15+ years of age and has so many inner page links I would use it for a programmatic build around specific phone numbers which get search volume and monetize it with display ads.
You can do multiple programmatic builds under different folders too, going for:
- Is it a scam phone number
- Is it a premium rate phone number
- Is it the real customer service phone number
- Is it a persons phone number
And all sorts of other variations of search terms that people use to find out information about a specific phone number.
Whilst the RPMs won’t be high, there is almost an unlimited number of keywords to build pages for as it’ll take tens of millions of pages just to cover the U.S., let alone any other country, and the majority of people won’t be able to get anywhere close to even building a million pages on autopilot, so the traffic (and ROI) potential for this site should theoretically be unlimited.
I would use a large number of links the domain already has as individual 301s to either niche specific or high search volume pages I am trying to increase the rank for as putting them all at your homepage can be a footprint for G to hit the new site on.
An example of this exact type of site you can base your own build on would be who-called.co.uk, which covers UK numbers and Ahrefs estimates is currently doing close to 2 million visitors per month which I’d estimate is currently making anywhere from $25,000 – $150,000 per month in revenue from display ads.
Building Empires Using Premium Aged Domains
Perhaps, the best thing about premium aged domains is that each of them represents a ready-made platform for launching a full-scale business. Whether you want to build a niche site to get affiliate or ad earnings, or build a self-sufficient brand based on it – these domains have everything you need to do either of these. Moreover, there are over 1,000 domains in 50+ industries available in the Odys Marketplace right this moment, so make sure to take a look at the full inventory.
