I guess that I have about 40 domain names that I own, which is actually a relatively small number. Other people who earn a living on the net own hundreds, even thousands of domains! One thing that I have done successfully to reduce the number of domains that I purchase is through using sub-domains in many instances. For example, I own WowPhilippines.com, where I have an e-commerce store. However, I don’t limit my use of the domain to that one site! No, sir! I have created sub-domains where I can also earn money. For instance, I have a blog for each province on the Island of Luzon, and they are all housed on Luzon.WowPhilippines.com. My Visayas blogs are on Visayas.WowPhilippines.com and so on. Honestly, I make a money from a lot of different sources, all through that one domain name – WowPhilippines.com. It keeps my overhead down (not buying hundreds of domains for those sites), but it is also a premium domain that serves me well.

Hitting the jackpot through domain niches!

Sometimes, I buy a domain, make some good money from it, and then it sort of becomes obsolete for me. What do I do then? Sell the name? Let it expire? No, in most cases, I keep the domain for some years, just to see if another money making opportunity arises with the name. For example, I have a site where I used to sell shampoo and conditioner. I did very well with the business, but after about 5 years my source of the product went away. I could no longer get the merchandise, so I had no more to sell. I guess it’s been a year or two since I’ve had anything to sell on the site, so it hasn’t been making me money. In other words, it cost me about $20 to keep the name for 2 years while I made no money. However, I have now found that another company has a supply of the shampoo in question, and they are advertising it through an Internet Advertising company. I won’t name the Advertising company, but I’ll say it is not AdSense. It is probably a name that you’d recognize if you have been into Internet marketing, though. Anyway, I simply slapped one of these advertisements on the home page of the site – just a single ad, and I am making on average about $15 per day from the ad! So, if this continues, I will make an average of about $450 per month from this domain name that costs me $10 per year to maintain.  Nice thing is, I am making that money and I don’t have to do any work for it!  I have my own web server, so hosting doesn’t cost me anything other than what I am already paying.

So, the lesson here is that if you have dormant domain names, or sites that are just sitting there doing nothing for you, it pays to periodically search to see if there is a new way to make a little extra money from the site! It works for me, and it can for you too!

These days, with almost any web hosting account, though, you can customize your 404 page.  So what?  Well, how about putting some free advertising on your 404 page?  Why not?

Now, be careful when you customize your 404 page, because you can’t put just any ads there.  For example, you cannot put Google AdSense on a 404 page, because that is against Google terms of service, and can get your AdSense account banned.  Other Advertising Networks likely have such a policy too.]

However, there is no reason why you can’t put ads for your own products!  For example, I have a number of eBooks that I have written and that I sell.  There is no reason I can’t advertise my own eBooks on my 404 page!  Why not do it?  Think about this, if your URL is very identifiable with a certain topic, then if you have eBooks about that topic, it will likely be of interest to the person trying to navigate your site.

For example, one of my domains is The Live in the Philippines Web Magazine.  If somebody is trying to go to that site, and they type in the wrong page, but they see an ad for information about Retiring in the Philippines in eBook form, there is a good chance they would have an interest.  Now, if I put an ad for car engine repairs on that domain, people would probably have little interest, but if it is for a related product you just might get a few extra sales from making the custom 404 page.

Yeah, you won’t make a mint doing this, but in these days of such a tight economy, you have to go for every advantage that you can get!

First, do you know what a “404 Page” is?  A 404 is the page that you get when the page you are looking for does not exist.  It is usually a blank page that says something like “the Page you are looking for cannot be found” or something along those lines.  It might be something more than that, as 404 pages can be customized to any look that you want.  Many people are starting to customize 404 pages with additional information that is helpful to the surfer.

I came up with an idea a few years ago.  It’s kind of an “evil” idea, some might argue, but it works for me too.  On sites where I have an e-commerce store, I have re-programmed my 404 page so that if somebody types in a wrong address on my site, they are automatically forwarded to the front page of my web store!  So, instead of being told that “the page does not exist” they will just end up on a page where they can buy things from me.  OK, that’s not too evil, but the more evil part is that I have actually set up 404 pages on other sites that are related, so that they also redirect to my store!  For example, if you go to bobsite.com and enter the wrong address, you will end up at bobstore.com instead!

404 Page

There are some downsides to this.  What are they?  Well, the surfer is taken somewhere that he doesn’t want to go.  If he is looking for some kind of information on your site, he won’t understand why he keeps ending up at this web store instead!  That can lead to confusion for the surfer.  I understand that, and to anybody who is confused like this, I am sorry for the inconvenience.  However, I also know that I have made sales by doing this too.  Also, in the places where I have set this up, the sites are related to the store in some way.  For instance, if they are going to a page that is somehow related to Davao City, yet they are redirected to the Davao Store, I don’t see a huge problem with it.  If they were surfing to a page where they expected information on New Mexico, and ended up at the Davao Store, that would be a problem, and also wouldn’t produce many sales, I would say.

Just for clarity, I am not creating pages to attract people, then removing them and redirecting to my store.  These are just legitimate cases of people typing in the wrong address and such.  Nothing devious about that.

Anyway, if you have money making sites, give this a try!  In your web hosting account there should be a way to customize your 404 page.  Just go there, and make the page a redirect to the place where you want people to end up!