If I am to reach my goal of serving 700,000 page impressions a month - and hopefully benefit to the tune of around £10,000 for doing so - I will need to have some pages to serve.

To serve pages I need a website (or two or four or 12) and of course every website needs a domain name , the internet equivalent of undeveloped real estate (add a website and you have developed real estate).

At present I have around 250 domain names at my disposal, most of which aren’t exactly showstoppers, but all can do a job. To register a domain name costs less than £5 a year for .uk domains and .com domains so individually they don’t need to earn a lot to pay for their keep.

Most of my domain names aren’t really worthy of webspace in their own right, but are ideal for driving “type in” traffic to those that are.

when searching for information via the internet, some people simply type a descriptive website address into their browser and hope for the best. So if they are looking for Raspberry Widgets they may just type in www.raspberrywidgets.co.uk. and that’s known as type in traffic.

If I owned a Widget business and knew people were looking to buy raspberry ones then I would probably buy that domain and redirect it to my main site. One extra customer is all it would probably take to repay the registration fee.

Just as importantly, domain names can be used to prevent others moving into your market. Buying domain names that include industry keywords, misspellings and the like is common practice to prevent others treading on your toes. If I know Raspberry Widgets are making me money, the last thing I want is someone else registering raspberrywidgets.co.uk, building a website and taking customers away from me.

Ideas for domain names come to me all the time. And when they do, and I think they are at least worth the registration fee, I check to see if they are available. You can do this by using the search facility on your favourite domain name registration website, but I prefer to use a fantastic little tool called the Domain Name Analyzer.

You may think that all of the best domain names have already been registered and you’d be right. Indeed, the resale market for quality domain names is buzzing at the moment, with fish.com selling for just over a million dollars in November, 2005, and bills.com, property.com and website.com all attracting high six figure sales last year according to Domain Name Journal.

But incredibly owners of domain names worth thousands regularly allow their registrations to lapse and this has spawned an entire industry dedicated to securing them as soon as they are released back onto the open market. More about that in a later post.

Of my domain names, only a dozen or so have been developed into something resembling websites and over the last ten to 12 months I have been using them to test ideas and to start the money ball rolling.

Nearly all could do with being updated, maybe redesigned and better targeted. In fact having surveyed them last night I am embarrassed to say that a couple are on the critical list as far as their worth to visitors at the moment, but I think three have the potential to be big crowd pullers (and I’m including entrepreneur.co.uk in the latter bracket) with the possibility of a dark horse or two emerging from the ranks of the others.

And this weekend I’m going to complete my survey of what needs done to them to bring them up to speed with the task that lays ahead for them and get on with doing it.