Good News, Your Domain Expired

Back in January I signed up here, desperate to make money. At the time I was averaging $1.50 a day. The money was from a blogger blog I made three posts on back in 2009. I had purchased a domain name when I made the blog and I pointed the domain to the blog.

Yesterday I forgot about all the article writing and SEO stuff I have been planning and dreading and I got it in my head I'd go do something with that old blog. I changed the template to one of the new mobile friendly, blue and white templates and changed the navigation and advertisements. Then I wrote a new blog post with an affiliate link and retired for the night.

I slept in and when I woke, checked my affiliate programs. I had made another $27 on the mini banner.

Then I tried to go to the site. I got a "Server cannot be found" message! I have spent most of the day trying to figure out what happened and trying to fix it. I finally found the answer in my email. It seems while I was freaking out about my unexpected life changes, blogger was sending me emails trying to get a valid credit card number before deleting my domain and google apps info. And now godaddy says they can give me my domain back for $70 plus some other charges. Seems blogger registered through godaddy and they want some sort of "finders fee" or something like that.

So, a short while ago I was laying in bed trying to feel tired when I thought I remembered something...

I got up and logged into blogger and found the "Stats" link on the dashboard. There's a lot of cool stuff in there, but there were a couple things that were striking.

FIRST: Since I opened the blog and then forgot it back in 2009 it has had 7,024 page views. Last month it had 994.

SECOND: The search terms people use to find the blog have changed. The blog's name is made up of the two words that use to be the top search term landing people on the blog. For some reason that term has dropped.

Here's where I decided to go with the thought that went through my head as I was trying to sleep... I checked to see if the top search term landing people on the blog had been registered as a domain name. It wasn't registered, so I took it.

In the last 30 days this silly blog has made me $97.71 in affiliate commissions and cost me $10. That's $80.71 profit for the month with like 15 minutes "work". And now I have a domain with more monthly searches. I'm actually feeling good about having a domain expire.

Now I'm thinking I need to outsource some writing and then see if I can do this again with a different niche.