I have a 3 word, computer related domain that used to make about $20 per month parked.

I paid someone on craigslist $75 to write 6 short articles, and put a 6 page website up with adsense on each page. The domain has ZERO links coming into it, but still ranks in the top 10 for this non-competitive 3 word phrase.

In the last 6 months this domain has made $1486 - about $1350 more than it would have if it was parked.

They all don’t work out like this, but if you develop a few sites and one or two of them get these results it will be well worth it.

Tip: Start with non-competitive, long tail terms in high $ keyword niches.

Today there are kids making a lot of money online. In the old days, there was no online. You could either get a paper route, mow lawns or you could sell sea horses or subscriptions to crappy newspapers (see below).

I laughed at the whole selling seahorses thing, until I remembered that the first time I ever tried to make money I was about 5 years old and took some frogs over to a neighbors house and asked if they wanted to buy them. Our next door neighbor paid me $.25 to let one go. The rest is history….

Last week Rick Latona sold the domain (and small website) FollyBeach.com for $98,000. This is a high price for this domain in my opinion - Folly Beach is a beach town in South Carolina, but is not a major tourist destination. A key piece of the sale was probably the fact that this website was making $20 per day with Adsense (largely due to high google rankings) - and that is where the world of domainers and webmasters collides.

Many domainers will pay 5 to 10+ years earnings for domains that have natural type in traffic. They look at these names and assume this type in traffic will keep on coming for years and years and that this traffic is simply an annuity. Whoever bought this domain saw a very nice geo domain (a nice value in and of itself) but they also saw $20 per day and probably used a bit of domainer math to rationalize the $98,000 asking price.

Webmasters on the other are much more likely to buy and sell sites based on 10 months earnings than 10 years (understanding the ups and downs of Google etc). It all depends on the domain and the web site history, but multiples for buying and selling websites are generally closer to 6 months -3 years.

What this means:

Webmasters - If your site is on a decent domain, head over to the domain forums, double your price and sell your site there before you sell it on sitepoint.

Domainers - Develop your generic .com domains, get a bit of search traffic coming to your domain and you could double the value of your domain with minimal work. Spend some real time on your site and you might be able to increase the value of your site 5x or more….