Developed websites are parked at a hosting provider. Websites usually include content and design in addition to the domain name. The meaning of "content" can range anywhere from articles to submitted videos. Developed domains are often more profitable but harder to produce.

Developing a website can be a challenge in its own but it is the most rewarding financial venture you can partake in the domain investing field. It requires technical knowledge and understanding of how the internet works but it’s not impossible to learn. In addition to the above, you need to know the basic skills and methods of internet marketing & general business theory.

Benefits Vs Downsides

Benefit: More potential to earn money

Downside: Start up costs are higher and it can take longer to see revenue results

Benefit: Better way to brand

Downside: The wrong branding can hurt your website

Benefit: Value is higher than with a domain alone

Downside: Dying trends can lower the value of a website

Benefit: Long term earning potential

Downside: However, the revenue can trickle in versus if you sell it instead

Benefit: Better control of traffic

Downside: But it’s a never ending fight to stay ahead

What You Need to Know

There are three basic types of profitable websites: informative, interactive and community. Of course, there are other types and sub-types but we will just cover the ones you’ll most likely come in contact with while domain investing.

Informative

Information based websites connect readers with education, informative or entertaining content to keep the visitor engaged and busy. Advertising services are often weaved into the site’s content such as Google Adsense, that serve relevant ads to encourage readers to click and earn the website owner revenue.

Interactive

Games, animation and videos that keep users entertained and absorbed into the website are great examples of interactive websites. This type usually does quite well with return visitors and revenue.

Community

These websites bring people together; whether a forum, a blog or a service such as Facebook.com or social content such as Twitter.

Planning

Before you begin constructing your website, it is important that you know what you want your site to accomplish. You should know the mapping of any scripting that may be involved. You should know what pages and content will be displayed on your site and how you want advertising to be laid out.

Answering the following questions will help you put focus into constructing your site:

• Who is your site audience?
• What will they be interested in reading about or doing while on your website?
• What are some possible ways your site and can serve something to your target audience that other sites don’t?
• What are some things you can add that will keep them there the longest?
• Who are your competitors and what are they already doing?
• What are some things you can do better than your competitors?
• How will you obtain content?
• How will you keep content fresh and how often?
• What areas will need to be scripted and what is the visual map of that scripting?

Planning your website also helps you discover how you want to advertise and promote. You’ll want to know your site audience so well that you know where they hang out and why.

Website Aging

Website aging allows time for the increase of traffic and/or revenue. The theory is like a bottle of fine wine; the longer its around, the better it becomes. The same is true with websites. The older a site is, the more it will be indexed by search engines, the better its traffic will be and the higher its value it will become.

In theory, you want to sell your websites and domains as soon as possible to get a return as soon as possible. However, some websites are worth waiting for. If you have an idea that’s unique you’ll want to allow enough time for the website to age and show its potential muscles to other investors for resell. This dramatically increases its value.

Keep the Site Fresh

Content scheduling allows you to keep a site updated without having to focus daily on management. You can do this yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Some sites may require a daily update, a weekly update, monthly, yearly, etc. It all depends on your topic and audience. Content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla allow article scheduling which means you can add content at once but schedule the releases. It is better to schedule 20 articles to release over the period of 20 weeks than to publish all 20 at once (by the time next week or next month rolls around your site will already be stale!). Therefore, decide how often to update your site and make this process semi-automatic.

Your Baby But Also a Business

Even if you do not plan to turn your website into a full fledged business, it still needs to be treated like one. This means: keep up with stats, trends, report on site usage, look for areas of improvement, solicit user feedback, etc.

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