If you’re reading my blog, I have to assume that you will have read Frank Schilling’s latest post, after all, his views are more important than mine and he is a lot more successful at domaining than I will ever be.

If you haven’t read it, you can find it here.

It’s an important post because it marks a sea change in how big domain players are now viewing their traffic and their domain assets.

If your sole source of income is Google or Yahoo, you’re being screwed our of money that should be yours. There’s no question about that, but there are also so few games in town that it’s absolutely inevitable that you won’t make as much money as you should.

For years, domainers (including me) have made some decent (and indecent some would say) money by simply selling their traffic  to Google or Yahoo. It was the lazy mans way to riches and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. I prefer to make money when I’m sleeping, it just doesn’t happen as much as I’d like.

Even now, the developer networks that are springing up are still basing their models around Adsense, ad networks and affiliate programs and personally, I don’t think it’s such a smart move.

What’s really happening, is that domainers are handing their assets over to somebody else who effectively tells them not only how they should make their money, but also how much they should make.

That’s because they are all applying a formula to the development.

There’s no “thinking out of the box” either. From what I can see, all they’re doing is appeasing the networks again and letting the big boys dictate the shots.

Sadly, there’s not much of an alternative. That’s why I do things differently. It’s a slower road and one that has been fraught with difficulties which I’ve had to overcome myself along the way, with nobody there to hold my hand.

On my own journey, I’ve met plenty of people that have tried to rip me off and take my traffic for nothing by not paying me when they should have. I successfully turned the tables on them though and now I pretty much name my own prices and I sell my leads to honest people who have grown to understand the value of what I bring to the party with my names and SEO skills.

To a very tiny degree, I have managed to steer clear of a reliance on the networks and I have people who are effectively buying my traffic directly and working in true partnership with me.

That’s what the future holds for domainers.

How many people would be interested in having THAT kind of development service instead of the PPC nonsense that’s being touted at the moment?

I’ve not perfected everything yet, but I’m getting there and am preparing to introduce it to the market as a package. It might take a while, but I’m already streets ahead with the experience.

Every now and again, usually when I have a spare few hours, I scan my domain name list to find a likely candidate for some development.

Sometimes, that development will involve creating a small site with an occasional affiliate link, some Adsense and perhaps even some promotion of a business that’s local to me.

Usually though, I build sites that are designed specifically to target certain visitors looking for certain services or for very specific information.

I’ve been looking at some of the domain development tools and services web sites this week and there are quite a few domain developers with some nice offerings.

I am still concerned about some of them though, since they still don’t address the main issue that is actually a threat to domainers.

They are all based mainly around affiliate programs and pay per click, with a load of article generation and social media thrown in.

Now I like passive income as much as the next person, but I prefer to keep all of the money on the table, not just a fraction of it. I also like to have full control over the sales process.

So the question for domainers is, can you still earn a passive (or mainly passive) income without having to use affiliate programs or Adsense?

Well I do.

On one of my sites, I sell a service for £30.

That service costs me £10 and is carried out by a third party.

My non-passive involvement is to take the contents from one envelope and re-address it to the actual service provider.

Payment is made at the point of sale – the customers either send me a cheque or they pay up-front using Paypal, so there is never a bad debt situation and there’s no need for invoicing. The companies I deal with issue one invoice per month and give me 30 days to pay, so I’m also getting up to 60 days free use of the money.

If that same service were available as an affiliate program, or pay per click, I’d earn less than £1 per sale. Doing it the way I do it, as a re-seller, I make £20 per sale – or multiples of £20 when more than one unit is purchased, which is common.

Once research is factored out of the equation, the Internet is all about convenience.

If your developed site offers a customer convenience, cost consideration all but disappears and people will pay up without questioning the price.

How do I know? Because I am doing it every single day of the week, including weekends.

I have yet to see any domain development service that can handle this kind of model, which is why I do it all myself. I did consider offering that as a service, but I do think that the domain community still doesn’t quite understand the power of the assets they are are sitting on.

If they did, they wouldn’t be selling, they’d be developing.

I was in discussion today about the subject of development and in particular over-development.

It’s too easy when developing a domain, to get sidetracked into areas that you really shouldn’t be concerned with. I’ve been there and done it too many times myself in the past.

Here’s what typically happens.

The initial enthusiasm for the domain is so great that you start imagining what the site could be. So, in the search for content, particularly user-generated content, you add things like a message board, some social networking stuff, geographical information like maps and transport links – all stuff that ultimately earns you nothing.

It’s often quoted that in order to have a successful site, you have to keep things simple. That’s fine as far as that advice goes, but it takes a bit more thinking in order to make money from a site or a domain.

Rather than just keeping it simple therefore, the key is to strip out anything, and I mean anything that does not directly lead to either a payment per click, an affiliate commission or a sales lead or even a direct sale.

This means re-examining and focusing on one question which is simply – “where is the money in this?”

If you can’t see it, don’t develop it.

If you can see it, make sure that is your sole focus, because everything else is just noise and a distraction from the goal.

So when you’re next in the market for a solution in a box, which generally includes things like social media, blogs, forums and chat rooms, think very carefully about the time that kind of site will suck from you every day and then strip it back to basics and develop it yourself.

An example from today – one of my specialist surveying sites today generated an enquiry from Brazil, to survey 30+ large buildings. The site in question successfully sold the idea of this type of survey by providing only the information that a building manager would find interesting.

The enquiry wasn’t “can you do it?” it was “how much do you want to come to Brazil for this project?” I’m still considering my answer but after a summer of rain, Brazil looks very tempting. Wonder if the family can go too…