With pay-per-click revenue from 9,000+ domains like Orgasms.com and Inventing.com, 200+ websites like Dumb.com and Adoptme.com, and sales of names like Taboo.net and sales of websites like Bored.com – Eric Borgos has figured out how to make money and a living online.
How did Eric Borgos get rich online?
Even though Eric has made millions, he’s not sure about the answer. But one thing’s for sure, he didn’t want to keep working for other people, and decided he could do things on the internet on his own. According to Eric’s blog:
Because I run my own Internet company, I often get asked the best way to make money online. Oddly enough, I have no good answer for that question. I was able to be successful mostly because I got in on the ground floor (back in 1995). I started by creating web pages for small businesses for $50-$100 each, plus I offered hosting for them. so I decided it was not worth the time and effort to convince people to create websites, just for the small amount of money I would make from it…
After a few years of being a web designer and web host, I saw all the sales my clients were getting from the pages I made for them and I decided I would be better off creating sites for myself instead. By then I had built up a portfolio of several hundred domain names, all of which were sitting there unused, so I decided to develop them.”
Registering Domain Names, and getting them on the drop
How did Eric get Bored.com – the name he ultimately developed and turned into a multi-million dollar sale? He got it on the drop.
Network Solutions used to take the domains back around 4am-5am (Eastern Time) each morning, so I would make sure to get up by then and frantically keep typing in my list of domains one by one to try to buy them. That is how I bought Bored.com. I would also sometimes find good domains that nobody ever registered before…
Developing websites from his domain names, entire networks of them
Eric learned early on that web development was key. Listing links to relevant sites run by other people on Bored.com – Eric decided to build up his own network of sites and send traffic from his Bored.com hub, to his own sites – growing his own network and revenue. Eventually, Bored.com was pulling in revenue of $35,000 / month, and traffic was growing to other sites.
As the Internet grew in the early 2000’s, so did the number of visitors to Bored.com, and I was able to run ads from major ad networks such as DoubleClick. That increased income significantly, and I decided that instead of linking to other sites and giving them all the free traffic and ad income, I would be better off creating my own sites to link to instead.
Trying new ideas
Eric is completely honest about his success and his failures. But most importantly, he writes on his blog, to try new ideas.
…other than sites that were related to Bored.com, almost none of the sites I created or bought in the past few years made any significant money. This might be my fault, in that I didn’t promote them well, but I think it is much harder to get a good site noticed nowadays. That is not to say that there is not money to be made online though, because of course there are plenty of people who recently started sites that became successful. The good thing though that is is much easier, faster, and cheaper to start a website than it used to be. It is certainly worth trying any ideas you have, because you never know what will catch on.
List of sites
Alot of Eric’s sites receive thousands and thousands of visitors. If you take a look at them, you might be surprised how simple some of them appear to look, but the niche they fill and the interest they draw, is no surprise. Sites like CheapFlowers.com are businesses, not just content.
Here’s a look at some of Eric’s sites.
Many individuals and organizations still hand-register domain names. We still do, and with the market favoring the buyer, we’re finding more and more domain names deleting and not being registered again. In the past few days we’ve hand-registered several names, including several poker terms that had been registered for years, that deleted then became available.
