Some of you may or may not know but one of my biggest successes as far as domain mass development goes has been in the adult business. I took approximately 3,000 hand registered com/net/org keyword domains and turned them into a multi million dollar operation fairly easily. It involved a few partners of mine because pulling off this type of stuff individually is pretty much impossible. It was a team effort from start to finish... It all started in 2004.
We registered all of the most popular pornstar names and mass developed them blog/tgp style. Now I know exactly what you are thinking... But no, we didn't infringe anything or do anything wrong. We played by the rules for the most part. We did all the research and avoided all of the pornstar names that either had a trademarked name or ones that had official websites setup so 98% of the names we had were 100% clean and risk fee. You see, pornstar names / aliases / nicknames or whatever you wanna call it are just made up fictional names. Kind of like tv / movie stars or characters. So we never had a problem. Not a single lawsuit. Not a single UDRP filed against us. It was all perfectly legit and worked out lovely from a-z. It's too bad you didn't think of this first right?
So it all started in 2004 when I was registering available .com domains for up and coming pornstars and typos of some of the most popular pornstars as well. The domains would receive a lot of typeins and obviously made money too. I had them all parked. One day I had a chat with a guy who ran a softcore adult affiliate program, one of the best out there actually... And one thing led to another and he said that he would like to purchase all of my pornstar .com domains so he can redirect all of that traffic to his softcore adult sites. I sold him my pornstar domains collection which consisted of a few hundred domains of both properly spelled pornstar names as well as common typos for a really nice profit. He was very happy with the deal and so was I. Win-win for all.
A month or two goes by and he contacts me again and asks me if I have anymore pornstar domain names... I told him unfortunately I don't as I was focused on other domain acquistions and development projects... I did ask him how the traffic is converting and whether he is happy with the purchase and he said that he couldn't be more pleased. He said that he would be willing to pay top dollar for this type of pornstar traffic and that is when a lightbulb went off. That is when I figured out that there is a lot of money to be made with this pornstar traffic. A lot more than with domain parking.
The pornstar traffic must of converted really well. So, I do some research and speak to some of my partners and we decide that we need to put to good use our search engine optimization skills and mass development capabilities to pull in as much pornstar traffic as possible from Google and Yahoo and hopefully make a lot of money by sending/selling this traffic to pornstar affiliates. We start by registering a few hundred pornstar keyword domains in net / org since the dot com's were of course already taken and launch them. We optimize them and within a few weeks they start pulling in traffic from Google. Few month's later from Yahoo and MSN as well. The sites were receiving lots of traffic. Just to give you an idea... It was a few hundred visitors per day, per site... On average. Some received over a thousand. Daily!
So a few month's into this operation things are working out lovely. In 2005 we decide to get serious about the pornstars networks and register hundreds of new pornstars keyword domains every few month's and mass develop websites on them. By the end of that year we had over one thousand websites. By the end of 2007 we had launched approximately 3,000 pornstar keywords domains. At the peak of our operation we had something like 10,000,000 unique visitors monthly. If you know anything about adult traffic and conversions... You can figure out on your own how much money the traffic was generating for us as well as our affiliates/partners.
Now, we could of just sat on our asses and register thousands of typos of pornstar domains and get a few visitors per domain each day and park them and collect a few pennies per click or register the pornstar domains in net/org as well which do receive some typeins as well because for peoples websites, if there isnt one on the .com people will attempt to type in the .net to see if there is a website there and if there isn't one on the .net they will attempt to go with the .org because it is pretty common to have celebrity/people domains on com/net/org. So anyways, we wanted to get all of the traffic we could get and obviously make a lot of money... That is why we mass developed the websites. We don't do things just to make a little money. If we did something, we did it big. We liked to shoot for 100x return on investment which is nice number.
So from starting with this setup in 2005 and into 2008 we generated a whole lot of traffic and buzz. Daily we would get requests from sponsors trying to get us to promote their content / partnership requests. Daily we would get requests from people trying to buy up advertising space as well. Everybody knew about the networks and everybody wanted in on them. We never really sold any of the ad space with the exception of a few cases here and there where we got paid up-front and in advance for a few month's.
What we did do though, is the following.. When a serious adult affiliate sponsor came knocking on our door, who was interested in buying up advertising.. We offered him to straight out buy the sites instead of essentially "rent" the traffic month-to-month. They always jumped on this offer without hesitation because we priced it more than fairly. We had them setup in 30 sites per network. So this way, we sold a few networks each and every month. For thousands of dollars each. It was a great deal and a no brainer.
It only cost us a few hundred bucks to put up a network and mass develop it. The registration costs of $7 multiplied by 30 domains and mass development labor which only involved writing one or two intro paragraphs on the main page and some custom SEO tweaks. So anyways, we made a lot of money from developing the networks by collecting pay-per-signup commissions and selling the networks/traffic directly. I still have a few of the better pornstar networks left til this date which I kept for myself. The last pornstar network that we sold was last year.
So yea, we came up with a pretty unique idea and setup.. and with the research at hand... We put in the work, and it worked out really well and lasted for a good period of time. A lot of copycats popped up of course with the same exact setup and it was replicated by dozens of people over the years in the pornstar niche as well as many other niches. We were the most successful though and the original ones to be able to pull this off and on a larger scale. We had a great run from 2005 upto 2008. Everybody involved made out with tons of money. The affiliates/sponsors who we sent traffic to from our websites and anybody who bought the traffic or website networks from us.
There was also a lot of haters who started BS all over forums who bitched and moaned. We also got a lot of good as well as bad press. We kept a low profile though for the most part and went about doing our biz.. Flying under the radar. As do most successful businessmen in the adult and SEO biz. When you come up with an original idea and you are able to execute it properly it is really great. Looking back, I have to say that I wouldn't of been able to pull this off by my self of course and it was a big time team effort. It's important to have good partners and people to be on the same page as you are who believe.
Our pornstar networks will go down in history of search engine marketing and domain mass development as probably one of the top 10 or 20 most successful and effective SEO campaigns ever but not too many people of course will know this. You never hear about the big success stories for very good reasons. You don't do this stuff for the fame or anything else. It is strictly business. You get in and get out. This stuff is kinda tricky and once you accomplish your goals you move on. We did. The websites we have setup over the years are still pulling in lots of traffic and making everybody richer day after day. Like clockwork. Keeps going and going and going... We've applied the same setup across many other niches including Music, Real Estate and Travel. Since 2002 I've been doing this and here we are in 2009, we are still rocking hard. Long live SEO and good original development ideas. It's where the real money is.
Articles at WannaDevelop.com
05/08/2010: Dozens of exact match product / shopping related sites at auction now @ Latonas.com 03/19/2010: All domain development = $99 per domain... Pretty good deal, don't you think? 02/18/2010: New year.. New products... New prices.. New staff... Lots going on in the development biz! 02/06/2010: Must see auctions at Bido! Five days, back-to-back all this week.. Over 100 keyword domains priced to sell! No offers will be turned down 12/01/2009: Domain Stryker pre-registration now officially open... Launch date set for later this month!
