As you know, getting companies to place advertisements directly on your website without using a middleman is the most advantageous for you. You can earn more money and establish a personal relationship with your advertisers, something both parties will benefit from. It’s often tedious to get advertisers for your website, especially if its not your primary focus, but if you are building a directory in a vertical where you don’t have much knowledge or contacts, here’s a quick suggestion.

Do some research and find the biggest franchisers and largest organizations in your industry. Many companies in the industry will proudly display their memberships on their website, and you can easily see what companies are part of a franchisee.   Instead of contacting smaller companies individually, contact the CEO or Director of Marketing for the franchise or organization, and try to get all of its members to sign up for advertising.

Offer the company or organization a considerable discount for its individual franchisees or members if the company or organization offers an endorsement of your website. Ask to be included in the marketing materials as well, since many provide a guide to marketing for members.

Some organizations won’t do endorsements, but you can ask for their rates to market to their members. Most have newsletters and other types of sponsorships available for your company. If you can’t afford to pay for the marketing costs, offer to do a marketing exchange by adding banners, special offers, and/or other special marketing exchange.

Working with the largest groups can help ramp up your revenue quickly.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/litandmore/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I was informed that there may be a computer virus making the rounds, specifically sent to domain owners. The virus has been sent from different email addresses, but the subject of the emails was “Buy Domains.” The emails contained an attachment called “DomainsE.doc.exe.” and that has an executable virus that may be harmful to your computer.

Although social networking has made it even easier for people to communicate and has made people less likely to question a random targeted email, we need to be cautious with threats like these. Make sure you keep your virus checking software updated, and run the software to check your computer as often as possible.

I get a lot of random emails and can be complacent sometimes, but I hope this warning is helpful. If a domain theft happens over the holidays, it can take a good amount of time to get in touch with the right tech support and legal staff to recover them, and you don’t want this to ruin your holiday. Losing your domain names can be a malicious keylogging software installation away, so be careful when you receive emails (even targeted ones) from people you don’t know.

Photo credit:Don Hankins: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23905174@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

I was chatting with fellow domain investor, Peter Davis, about my DogWalker.com project, and we started discussing the opportunity cost of my working on this project. Peter knows that walking my dog is part of my daily routine, so it’s not really costing me much, but it could be difficult for my blog readers to do the same type of project.

“What might seem like fun stuff you do in your daily routine would be real work to other people,” said Peter.

I absolutely agree with what he is saying here, and it is certainly something you need to consider before embarking on a project such as the one I started. My reply to Peter was that “I hope people see that if you have a hobby or are passionate about something, you can turn that passion into a business opportunity.”

Starting a business is tough – it can take a lot of time and effort to do it right, and even if you do it right, it might not be successful. If you are building a website related to something you are passionate about, it’s less like work and more pleasurable.

This is probably the primary reason why I am making little money on TropicalBirds.com, which gets close to 5,000 visitors per month, and why the project is stalled. I am not passionate about birds and really have no interest in them. It’s a domain name and website I believe someone will want to buy and better monetize, but until that time it was stay as is.

People still frequently sell domain names based on PPC revenue multiples. Personally, I don’t generally buy or sell based on a revenue multiple since that number is a moving target, but in case you do, here’s a quick tip that could help.

Do a quick back-of-napkin investigation about the domain name’s current owner. See what other domain names he owns and where he parks them. If he has a number of good domain names all parked with the same company, you can probably assume he has a more favorable revenue share with the parking company than the average client – which may or may not be you.

If his revenue share happens to be 50% higher than yours, you will make much less money even if everything else is the same – exact same landing page, same layout, same parking company…etc. If you change parking companies, that number is even more of a crapshoot.

On the other hand, if you see that his landing page isn’t optimized, or if you know your revenue share is on a VIP level, you could be paying an even better revenue multiple.

Just beware, as public companies need to disclose on their forward looking statements, “past performance is not indicative of future results.” This is especially true with PPC revenue.