Realising that I had 500 domain names (and counting) in my internet empire made me realise that I have to do more with them. The vast majority just sit there doing nothing but gather virtual dust.

To save money in registration fees, I have become a member of Nominet and can now register names directly for £5 plus VAT. That’ll save me about a pound a name every two years or a few hundred pounds a year. That said, my new found ability to register a name with just one click of a mouse will no doubt see my domain headcount rising at a faster rate than before and so any savings will be spent on registration fees anyway. And then some.

Some of this month will be set aside to going through my domain list name by name to see how they can be put to work for me either immediately or in the very near future.

My domain names fall into three main categories.

Domain names that have already been developed into a website or are high on my list to be developed.

Domain names that are related to those that have been developed or will be developed and that can direct traffic towards those websites. Here I am hoping that net surfers will type a related domain name into their browser so that I can automatically direct them to the site that has been developed.

And then there are domain names that aren’t in any stage of development and that don’t fill the above support role either. The vast majority of my domain names fall into this category and so I have decided to park them at Sedo.

Sedo is one of the world’s biggest domain name market places and currently over four million domains are listed on the site. You pay a commission if they broker a sale, but to actually list a domain name costs nothing and can prove profitable in more ways than one.

Firstly, someone may make an offer on one of my domain names that is too good to refuse.

Secondly, domain listing pages for parked domains contain advertising and Sedo share the revenue from those ads with the domain name owner. I don’t expect to make a fortune here, but better the names earn something than nothing.

The third way in which I profit from listing my domain names with Sedo is in knowing what level of natural traffic they attract from type-ins. This is good to know because it allows you to quickly spot opportunities that you might otherwise have missed.

Type-in traffic - where people literally type the domain name in and expect to be taken to a suitable website - is fantastic because it is free and it is perfectly targeted.

And it’s often the domain names that you least expect that have this traffic, either because of a past life as a website (some of my names were previously registered by others) or because they are generic enough for people to type them straight into their browser.

Targeted traffic is everything when you are trying to make a living via websites and so having access to this sort of information is excellent. I’ve already spotted a handful of names that get enough traffic to make me think they should be on my near future development list whereas beforehand they were all but forgotten.

The downside is that it is monotonous work when you have so many names to sift through, change the nameservers for and so on. An hour at a time is as much as I can stomach so it’ll take me a good month to get through them at this rate. Still it will be time well spent and will hopefully pay dividends later in the year.