Today my friend Marcus made me realize I've become a Domain Pimp. So I got this domainpimp.biz. It's also my first .biz domain. I think it's a dodgy TLD that suits the domain pimping business. Yes, ideally I would be working on more exciting things, stuff that changes the world for the better. I have done that but unfortunately it doesn't put much bread on the table. I prefer my bread organic, and from the experience I gained with getting a big part of the search engine market in a medium sized country I think I can get my daily full wheat organic bread within a pretty short time. I wanna do what I'm doing now till I reach about 1k/month steady income through advertising and affiliate marketing. That's more than enough for my way of living.
How I work
I don't really get domains just for hoarding them. I want to turn them into websites that actually pull in traffic. Make money through advertising and affiliate marketing, and sell some of them. I love making websites and I love to go about it in a frantic way. I've had days I set up more than one new website on a single day. I'm totally into open source, and even though I don't like PHP I end up using it all the time. Almost all of my sites are built with Drupal, MediaWiki and WordPress. I love adhocracy, I do thing on a whim so I also end up with tons of unfinished projects. I actually prefer to work like this, I'm not a perfectionist by nature. Though where it's required I can pretend to be one.
My lifestyle
Thanks to my lifestyle I don't need much money, and in the past I've put my skills to starting and working on great initiatives - e.g. the main global resource of hitchhiking and dumpster diving, I also spent some time working on the biggest hospitality exchange network. I love to work full time on stuff that makes people happy, that encourages sharing. But I also need some dough, hence I've decided to pimp domains for a while.
Believe it or not, I got into Drupal thanks to hitchhiking. And I learn a lot from random strangers. I also encourage all of my friends to blog and to turn all their valuable knowledge into social capital or into money, or both.
So why pimping domains?
So how does this fit in? Well, if I have 100 websites with a 50 cent revenue per day on average I make 1500 bucks per month, or rather euros of course, subtract some overhead costs and to me that's enough money to live comfortably. Given my nature and the nature of search engine optimization I also expect that once I reach this milestone I would easily get to double this amount a couple of months later without doing anything.
Why write about it?
Why not? I'm not giving away all of my "trade secrets". And while I'm at it I can spread a link or 2, 3 in these blog posts to some of my pimping projects. On top of that, I needed a place to advertise my activities in language more widely understood than Dutch. Of course you'll be able to read some good tips here, but given my background, my capabilities and sheer speed not many people will be able to copy what I'm doing anyway. Most people prefer the safety of their cubicle over a life of insecurities and a lot of smart folks just don't care so much about money. And even if someone were, the Internet is big enough for all us, there are so many opportunities.