I’ve finally completed the task of going through my domain name portfolio, one at a time, to make sure they are all at least attempting to contribute something to the bottom line. That means making sure they are either in some stage of development, earmarked for development, redirecting to one of my sites or parked awaiting further orders (domain name parking is where you point your domain name to a holding page with advertising on it and share any revenue with the parking page provider).

Halfway through the process I was invited to join Sedo Pro, which has the massive benefit of having an account manager to turn to for help and advice. What swung it for me was that Sedo have now opened a UK office and that’s where my account manager is. That should be a huge improvement in dealing with Germany.

The parking of domain names not only gives me an opportunity to earn a little something from domain names that I have registered but can’t immediately develop, but also lets me see what names attract natural traffic. Some names earn nothing ever from parking, others earn their registration fee back in days.

It also gives me a shop window for selling domain names, something that I’m sometimes willing to do if an acceptable offer comes in. I’ve just completed on the sale of a domain name for £2,000 which pleased my kids no end because I promised to buy them a Nintendo Wii on completion and it arrived on Thursday (domaining is a family affair for us, with my wife, 15 year old son and ten year old girl all owning domain names).

The other thing I have been doing this month is looking at improving earnings from one of my websites that should be earning more than it does at present. By experimenting with where I place Google Ads on each page, I have managed to double the click through rate and boosted the site’s earnings by a similar amount.

Previously I had an ad block at the end of the content, thinking that after reading the article visitors would look to the Google Ads for further information. But this wasn’t happening as often as I would have liked it to. So I moved the ad block up the page and placed it between the opening paragraph of text and the second paragraph. That’s all it took to double the click through rate.

And on key navigation pages I have placed three ad units instead of one and again have seen a jump in click through rates. The actual page area devoted to ads hasn’t changed because I’ve replaced one big ad unit with three smaller ones, but the smaller ones certainly look better and blend in with the look and feel of the pages better too.

I’ve also been looking at my affiliate marketing earnings across all of my sites and ways to boost them. Here I’ve been replacing banner ads (which generally speaking convert poorly because of  “ad blindness” among visitors) with editorial (sometimes no more than a sentence or two) and again I’ve seen a jump in revenue.

It’s true what they say - sometimes the little things in life that can make big differences.