Need suggestions.. Need Best monetizing strategies for Exact Match Domains

You could offer advertising space, if the site is well ranked on Google. Let them bid for front page / all page / above the fold placement.

If by monetize you mean 'profit from' your best bet is to email or get on the phone and sell them to those who could most benefit from a targeted geo domain. Otherwise, you're likely to spend a considerable amount of time trying to rank for them and, even then, advertising revenue won't come close to selling the name for $1,000.

Greatbizideas:

So what was your "great biz idea" for buying these names in the first place? Were you planning to just flip them for a profit, develop web sites then sell them to locals, or create your own authority sites on the domains?

What is stopping you from following through with your original intentions for these domains? Surely you must have had some idea when you bought the names how you would profit from them.

Steve

Depending on the number of domains that are DUI and the number of Divorce sites - there are a few options.

If you want to PM me - tell me the city names and I might have an idea for you depending which cities in California - I know both markets extremely well.

TheShark

To Monetize Your Domains:

Sell them where people who are serious are looking to buy. Try Flippa or GoDaddy Premium.

If you have domains specific to a city (as you have described), then get on the phone and call the top 10 divorce lawyers in that city and ask them if they are interested in buying. You still want to have the domain listed properly, that will help facilitate the transaction as well as increase exposure.

-Scott

Ok got your reply - was going to respond privately, but there might be something valuable in here for others - or maybe it might trigger an idea for someone to help you that I haven't thought about.

Ok - here it is a quick and dirty thought process:

Looked over your list and noticed your location. It's great that all of these are .com.

They're just not that valuable in and of themselves - a big chunk of them are in poor areas of California - bigger Spanish speaking populations as a percentage so the attorney market is relatively small that would want them. In other words, you thought correctly by targeting population areas of over 100k, but didn't think about the fact that the 100k is really only 66k and 33k (66 spanish speakers and 33 english) - just as an example - and poor, so no high dollar cases.

The main thing you could do to them would be time and skill intensive - that is create a blog network that has authority, but then you would have to monetize that - and that is going to be hard because link selling to attorneys is hard to sell in this market and an attorney understanding how to utilize a private blog network is even more rare.

Attorney directories are not really that profitable as most of them(us) won't spend a dime on them.

Most people would try to "sell" them to attorneys using mass email (I personally get over 300 emails a week that get through my spam filters) because of the number of websites I own and operate for myself and other lawyers - I also get an obscene number of phone calls that make it through our filters, so selling that way it ugly and hard - let's just say when someone does get through our phone filters, then through my receptionist, it almost always means they lied and if they get to me and it's not pretty for them - I have a system that guarantees they never call back.

That leaves only really 4 ways to sell the sites themselves - I'll tell you about 3 and just reference slightly the 4th (it's sort of a trade secret)...

1) In person selling - actually go to the law office (not really practical) from where you are at and the wide geographic area you are targeting

2) Direct mail to the prospects you identify - this would be my recommendation to you - I'll give you 2 ways to juice it at the end of this list (it applies to all of these options).

3) Trade shows for divorce attorneys or DUI attorneys - CLE conferences are the best so many of them are in one place at one time to talk with

4) If you have an attorney friend that is willing to help you - they might be able to do introductions for you - I do this for some of my people and depending on how it is done, it can very effective - but it's more for people that are in a business with multiple services which you don't appear to be

Now for ANY of the above - you don't have to be ranked, because you really won't be able to be ranked without a real address or attorney name on the site, but you do want a nice site already done for them to see when they pull up the address.

I know they're are many on this forum that will disagree with my suggestions - especially me being somewhat anti-email and anti-telemarketing - and I'm sure a few make more money that I do (the key word is "few")...but I guarantee that I'm probably one of the only practicing attorneys with multiple offices and a separate marketing business for attorneys on this forum and speaks from both sides of the field (selling to attorneys and people trying to sell to me).

TheShark

PS...On the direct mail - print out a color page of the website to see what they would be getting. Send it in a stamped (not metered envelope) - printed return address, handwritten mailing address. Keep the letter itself to one page - get to the point, get their interest, remind them of their pain (i.e. their current webpage sucks and has a terrible address), provide the pleasure (look at this pretty webpage ready to go and it's easy to market address).

PPS...Please excuse the grammar, spelling and typos, I'm doing this quickly while getting ready for an event.

My first thought after reading the language breakdown was to 'rent' the domain names as a redirect. Maybe a simple one-page site with some SEO friendly practical information and a free consultation offer. Two columns with the same content and redirect link, but one in English and one in Spanish.

If California is anything like Florida in this regard, there may not be the high dollar cases that would support buying/running a full site, but there are a lot of smaller cases that can be handled by associates, and renting the redirect isn't a big expense.

For the OP, such a rental would be almost passive income if he didn't get greedy.

Rank and rent.

i.e. get the sites ranked for those niches in those areas and then generate calls and leads and rent them to local businesses.

You can ad affiliate offers matching with the niche of every website.

It sounds like it is time to just dump the domains and move on.

The sites do not rank, so they get no traffic. No traffic means they really do not hold any serious value.

You cannot sell ad space because nobody wants to buy ads that nobody will ever see.

You cannot generate leads because you have no traffic.

You cannot rent the sites to anyone because nobody is going to pay money to rent a domain that has zero traffic.

So you have 2 options:

1) Dump them and forget you ever owned them.

2) Put some serious money into getting them ranking so that they can start generating leads for someone. Unless you have some serious SEO resources you can use already, you will probably have to just accept the fact that you are going to lose money on this for the first year or so. Then it will probably take another few months to recoup what you spent. You are probably looking at 12-18 months before you could really turn them into something profitable.