Renting out sites

Just a quick post to say how I'm doing renting out sites to local companies.

At the moment I have 2 companies that pay £25 per month and another 2 that pay £80 per month. I am on the first page of G for the main key phrases and they all have had sales due to been listed (more than they would let on I bet too)

The sites have all their details on and I post to it and do general SEO to keep it up.

I only have 4 as the first 2 businesses told another about how good I'm ranking with my sites and getting them extra leads/business.

So it would be nice to have say, 50 paying clients on average £35 per month by the end of the year.

I know a few on here rent sites out for £xxx a month but I'm very happy with achieving and getting the whole idea to locals that they can do well from domains and sites I've set up.

Hope this encourages other to offer similar in your home town, and I did give them 2-3-4 weeks free testing so they could see traffic and ideally phone calls.

 

Hey - good to hear, if your plan comes together by the end of the year it'll make a nice regular return

Are the sites local geo type service / product based or national based?

 

Sounds good other than this point which suggests rather than renting the domains to them you are actually selling them monthly seo services.

Personally I would have leased the domains to them and if they wanted ongoing posts and seo that would have been extra service with an associated fee.

I think you have well undersold yourself if you are providing a ranked domain and ongoing seo for £25 a month. With that value I am not surprised they recommended you to others!!

 

Good work pal. I agree that you're probably underselling yourself somewhat.
Did you originally buy the domains and offer them to the businesses for a monthly fee or what? How does it work?

 

Spot on. If you're actually doing anything for the amounts you're charging, you're ripping yourself off! The rental of a half-decent domain alone should come to more than you're charging, without any added value services.

 

If you actually providing SEO work and renting out your domains to your clients, those prices do seem very cheap indeed. Although because you still own the domains, I guess the seo work your doing is for yourself also, as the better they rank the more you can rent them out for.

 

yes but i think GDG buys geo domains which are inexpensive and readily available on these boards and if he is paying £xx per domain and doing his own web design then why not.....generally geo domains don't fetch big £'s (enduser) so it is a good idea !! also generates contacts within his local area for his troubles so a win,win situation in my eyes...it could be asked why dropcatchers catch domains for £30 when the domain they are catching is worth £xxx...

keep it up mate...

 

IMO that's a maybe. It depends on the domain names to a large degree. Since we don't know what they are the book really is open on this point.

 

Actually, it depends a whole lot more on what you value your time at, per hour. And you have to include EVERYTHING (admin work, collecting payments, article writing, SEO, customer support etc) to work out what it is really worth.

Quite often people dramatically underestimate the value of their own time and wind up working under minimum wage (you see that all the time on sites-for-sale websites where people will say things like "site makes £400 profit/month, takes about 15 hours a week to maintain.")

 

Valid point

 

thing is...we are not talking about letting plumber.co.uk go for #20 a month are we...i would expect to be able to knock up a simple html/wordpress site ,content and a bit if seo within an hour....add the domain...done get them on a rolling 12 month contract for #30 per month...i would expect to get to the top of google within a fortnight for a local geo...

some people have higher expectations than others,i for one am happy you have entrepreneurial spirit and a drive to make a success of your domains..

when a Company has purchased a domain from you for #x,xxx can you come on these boards and tell us....it would be nice to know how this business model as worked.....domain value #xx......paid a lease of #xxx......sold the domain for #xxxx

good luck with you project

p.s sorry i am on my missus's netbook and some keys are awol especially pound signs....

Mark:mrgreen:

 

I have a lot of domains that a do SEO little and often on and make up a nice bit from adsense each month.

I didn't want to be hung up by Google and rely on money from them or for one day for them to turn round (a robot) a suspend my account.

The domains that I'm renting out for £25 is a slight increase to what I was getting from G each month and yes I still own them. I do let them have a 2-3 week period to test it "proof in the pudding" and all that.

The first business recommended me to his brother which again priced higher than what Google was paying me and so i was happy. I post now and again to them and drop a few back links to them. So no hard SEO or work really!

Off the back of that he wants me to rebuild his site thats currently fully flash and needs a new one no questions.

As for the 2x £80 per month sites, I've made lots of contacts that are also interested in paying £80 pm and web work has come from them too.

No i'm not selling myself short, as traffic increases I'll slowly increase my monthly fee and show them stats to justify it. They won't say "call it a day" if it's getting work in from the site.

Any site you have if you can rent it out to anyone for the same or more than your making from G, then do it. If the business doesn't wish to carry on paying a monthly fee, all you do is add Adsense back in (un comment adsense code)

But 50 mini local sites at £25 per month (£1250) for very little SEO effort and the chance for leads and work! WIN WIN in my eyes

Thanks for the comments guys

 

I think your business model is great and I have been planning this myself for a while, but can I ask how you decide on pricing for each website?

 

I've recently done this with a local tradesman domain.

Cost £6 for domain
Spent ~ £75 on links - wrote 12 pages of content myself
Initially operated on 10% of jobs from leads, which came in at around £2-300 per month
Sold for £3200

The problem I had was agreeing a set rental figure - it wasn't worth me doing it for ~£50 a month, but companies weren't willing to pay hundreds with the possibility there may be zero leads. In the end we agreed on a percentage but I'm positive I didn't get a percentage of all the work and of course I couldn't track it.

The guy that I eventually sold it to said that he had done a lot of investigation into SEO/websites and was actually looking at getting a new one built himself. In the end it turned out that it would cost him ~£3200 anyway to have a new one built and SEO'd so he bought mine for the same price.

It was a good ROI and didn't really take too much time but once I've sold off the other couple of sites I have, then I doubt I will build any more to work off the same principle.

One of the things I noticed was the majority of the enquiries came from longtails, so although it had the vanity of being #1 for trade city, it was the other phrases which got the work.

Also to note, when the guy finally bought it, he said he was only looking to rent it short term as he was going to use the extra profit to build his own site and outrank the site I was renting to him (he told me this once he had agreed to buy mine.) I bet this is quite common though.

 

Why wouldn't you do it again if the ROI was good and not much time was spent on them?

 

The one I did, I happened to have a contact related to the trade so I could get images/info that I needed and knew what I was writing about.

With new sites I would either have to choose a new city, or a new trade.

I don't know about other trades, so they are more difficult to write about and also more difficult to get started, for example, I have one on plumbing, which on writing about being 'gas safe' was immediately sent a letter to tell me to remove it as they had no record of my 'company' on the gas safe register.

Also, while building my first site - the one I sold - I put my details on in order to get leads, then approached companies to pass on the lead, with a view to paying me a rental in future. The first guy I approached started to refit a bathroom, got bored and never finished it. Cue me getting a load of hassle to get the bathroom finished from the customer. (I just kept passing on the guys details but they kept calling me)

Those are a couple of things that put me off, the main thing though is I am trying to work on things that will give me a decent monthly income that can be scaled up - there is no room to do this creating small sites and selling them.