I started thinking that the mindset for domain investment to sell & domain investment to develop has differences. I came into IDNs with the intent to develop so I bought with that in mind. Then later I started to think about selling & changed strategies a bit. Lately I’m really back on track only thinking about development.
One difference I notice is the power of having a network. I like have sites that can feed off of each other’s links. I don’t have a really strong site anymore like IDNF but I think that if I created at least 2 sites like that before I can do it again (of course not the same topic). With developing also I am thinking about trending too.
What I am looking at & what others are looking at may be different. I am finding even if I have strong keywords .nets aren’t generating the same amount of traffic as my developed .coms or .jps. I purposely put up a few to test. I may try later with some stronger keywords.
I’ll give a good example of how to take advantage of having a network. I have about 20 different shopping sites currently. I took a chance to test an IDN.jp that wasn’t registered after the drop in the middle of the month. I also bought the ASCII version of the domain. I developed both & put backlinks on both. In less than 3 weeks the IDN is now at 300 unique users a day via PC & mobile. It would not have done this by parking the domain.
Having a network also lets you target keywords that are bringing conversions on your sites. I have one site that this week traffic rose 30% just because of the keywords in the link of another domain. These are some of the things you can’t do with the “traffic will just come theory”.
Anyway for all of you that just keep buying buying buying. Use some of it to develop. I read one article on Frager’s blog about the Castello brothers. These guys are brutally honest. They say hey we just bought dreamweaver & kept putting up content on our sites.
http://fragerfactor.blogspot.com/2010/12/castello-brothers-well-im-new-do-i-have.html
Look at what they have: A site network. Not all of the sites are the prettiest but they can control their investment.
Well most aren't able to have the ascii and idn version
I should have stated that the ASCII domain which is still good only gets about 3 to 5 visitors a day. The IDN for example is over 350 uniques. Strength of the network helped the IDN rank really quicker.