Well I have been testing out an experiment on the .info extension for the last 5 months starting july 1st up until now. The experiment was to see how keywords are impacted when they are not the major 3 extensions “.com,.net,.org”. I have some very good and not so good news. First I want to give some background on why I wanted to do this experiment with an extension most would look at and walk away from etc.

I have been domaining for a while now and honestly have heard every comment in the book about the .info extension. Cheap, spammy, Not worth a dime…etc etc. I have heard that if you do anything but .com your just a fool that one day will wake up and realize you have wasted all your money for no reason. After hearing this for so long you start to believe this babble that comes out of most old domainers that hold the key to the palace of .com keyword domains. I got fed up with that and decided to experiment with other extensions and stick to product generic keywords. Two word maximum with a search volume above 1k/month exact according to googles search tool.

The reason for choosing .info was simple there are quite a few good reasons to go with .info and below I list some of the most obvious reasons

• Cheap Pricing “$0.79″ –Low Overhead
• Less Competition –Easily pick up names at drop times “No crowds”
• Keyword Quality still available to register
• Unique extension that has limitless uses
• Many more reasons that I detail later on….

Now the challenge was could it be possible with the above attributes to take keyword generic .info domains and become profitable? Well the first thing let me tell you I’m not a web designer nor a developer of any sort..so developing websites is truly not my cup of tea. I had to find a solution that was relatively easy and pretty much hands off. I found an amazon store script that does the seo work and builds a store on autopilot for a good price. I thought well amazon is a very reputable business and people trust amazon why not become an affiliate of there’s and see where things go etc.

At the time of getting this script I had just over 100 .info product generic domain names. I started building the sites and it took me just over 2 weeks to complete. Once done I really didn’t have time to advertise or do any sort of link building so I let them get indexed naturally. After about 2 weeks I noticed traffic was picking up and that google was nice to me and indexed most if not all my sites. Now I went over to amazon each day to see if I had any sales therefore giving me a commission and nope none today. I went exactly 5 weeks with no commissions and therefore no money from sales.

I was beginning to get worried that I had made a horrible mistake and the .com naysayers where spot on with telling me I had wasted my money from the beginning. Then out of nowhere I viewed my amazon stats in week 6 and had 12 sales with a commission of $27.75. Now this may not sound like much to most but to me it was like finding gold on the street. I did my happy dance and called people I know and such. Now I’m not rich and with this experiment I had no intentions of getting  rich, but a residual income and proof that .info had legs to stand was my goal.

After this I started to see my traffic was picking up from 10 visits a month to almost 3,000/month. I use adsense and was starting to see $20 a month in clicks from users coming to the websites. I now had a network of product generic websites that were making $30 on amazon and $20 on adsense each month so basically $50 a month. While not a lot was a great ramp up and notice to me to keep pressing the envelope and do more. Now I decided that with 100 .info’s $50/month what would 300 .info’s do for me. I started each day collecting names at drop times and losing lots of sleep in the process. I began to get more and more traffic each and every passing day.

I now have around 900 .info websites developed and utilizing the same amazon script and methods. I will be reporting on the status of this network and bring you up to speed with part 2 and 3 of this experiment. For now I want you to walk away knowing that if you stick with product generic domains you’ll do just fine when it comes to .info domains

Until next time please don’t dismiss .info and keep in mind that we all are not as fortunate as some to have purchased domains prior to 2000.

Cheers

UsualCliche