A worryingly large section of the domain investor population thinks that investing in domains involves little more than buying a cheap domain then waiting a while until it’s inevitably bought by a billion-dollar company. But most investors don’t have only domains that are expected to make it big in ten years. Most of the time, if you’re a domain investor, your portfolio spreads across four main categories: parking, flipping, leasing, and long-term hold.
In this guide, we’ll tell you why some of your portfolio should also be placed in a fifth category: development. A static site generator helps you do this without breaking the bank.
Why develop your domain as a domain investor?
1. You’ll increase the value of the domain
An undeveloped domain has potential, which is why you can buy a domain for $1 and end up flipping it for $200 in 48 hours even if you never touch it again. But when you develop the domain, you can make more than just hundreds of dollars.
You can make thousands– even tens of thousands – on a website, if you can show your buyer that the website already has links and traffic and ranks well.
If you really want to increase your ranking, you can even use a PBN to help generate more backlinks. If you use a static site generator like FLATsite, you can make a bigger, more secure PBN to increase the value of all the sites you develop. And because static sites are cheaper to host, you can make a massive PBN without breaking the bank. (This is especially great news if you’re in an agency that creates and hosts thousands of domains and websites.)
2. Developed domains can pay for their own renewal fees
Domain investment has some of the lowest operating costs of any online business, and renewal fees are a huge chunk of that. But if you develop your domains, you can generate enough money to at least pay the renewal fees, which keeps more money in your pocket.
3. You can earn more per click than parking does
When you develop your domains, you get more pay per click than you do when you have to work through a parking company. This is yet another reason why developing your domains is a great way to maximize your returns.
4. You have more control over your content and ads
When you develop your website yourself, you have more creative freedom over the content on your website, which means you’ll get to frame the domain in a way that will attract high-paying buyers. Think of it like staging a house before you put it on the market.
Taking charge of the content on your website also puts you in a better position to control the kinds of ads that are displayed on your website. Most ads are innocent enough, but you don’t want to risk turning off a potential buyer because you didn’t check the ad quality on your domain.
5. It gives you access to more buyers
When you’re a domain investor, you spend a lot of time and energy putting your domain in front of potential buyers. But when you develop your websites, visitors will be able to find you in search engines, which means more potential buyers will end up seeing your domain.
6. It’s fun developing your domains!
Fun is probably the last thing on your mind when you’re managing your domain portfolio, but there’s something to be said for enjoying what you do. When you spend too much time racking up undeveloped domains and waiting for someone to come along and take them off your hands, you can get discouraged if you don’t get a buyer within your anticipated time frame.
Why not distract yourself and make money in the process by developing some of the sites in your portfolio? This works best when you choose a niche you’re already interested in.
The more fun you have developing your domains, the better will be the quality of your website, and the higher it will rank. This means you can ask for a higher price when a buyer does come along.
7. It’s an unexpected goldmine
If you play your cards right, you might find that one of your websites is so much fun to develop and makes you so much income that you don’t even want to flip it. When this happens, you can either set the price high enough that selling the site becomes attractive to you again, or you can take the site out of your flipping portfolio altogether and use it as an additional income stream.
You don’t need to develop every single domain in your portfolio to benefit from these tips. But if you develop just a fraction of your portfolio – anywhere from 5% to 10%, you could make enough money to pay your renewal fees and have your domains earn money while they’re sitting in your portfolio.
Wrapping up
When you develop your domains, you can generate enough money that the domain pays its own renewal fees. You can also increase the domain’s value exponentially, so that by the time you do flip the domain, you make more money than you ever thought possible. And developed domains can be a great source of secondary income. There’s really no good reason not to develop some of your domains!
Develop your domains on FLATsite and start increasing your domain value today! Make the first step, head over to our plans and choose the best one for your portfolio.