While doing some research on renting out my condo in Charlotte, I found a novel technique for making money from Craigslist.  About once a week, someone posts links for a condo for rent. The person’s posts have pictures and a very reasonable price listed. Instead of providing a phone number or email address, he encourages people to contact him through his website. The site is a domain parking page at Sedo with PPC ads for condos in downtown Charlotte. The condo market is pretty hot here, and related keywords are going for over $1.00 per click on Adwords. Even after Sedo takes their cut, he is still doing pretty well. I am curious how much traffic this could generate.

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a new site to make buying existing websites and domains easier. Tonight, I can proudly say that SiteViper 1.0 is now up and ready for action. I was spending a lot of time scanning forums that listed websites for sale. The process is terribly inefficient, and I am not a big fan of the tools that are already out there to help aggregate listings.

So why is SiteViper worth using?

• SiteViper aggregates for sale listings from around the web so that you don’t have to spend time wading through forums. Listings are refreshed every 15 minutes, so you will not miss anything.

As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

Have you ever wanted to give a domain a test drive before you sunk $9 into buying it for a year? Pool.com just released a new service allowing you to do just that. With their new Catch & Release program, you can register a domain name for 4.5 days to test it out for $.20. A $250 deposit is required to use the service.

In browsing through my favorite webmaster related forums, there are occassionally a few posts that stand out as hidden gem. This post on Niche Selection and Site Creation Process is one of those gems. I especially like the tips that people give on all of the tools they use to evaluate new opportunities. SEOBook’s keyword suggester and NicheBot were two of the best that I saw. Personally, I also have used Symbiotic which has a nice database of Adsense prices.

I will keep pointing out these hidden gems as I find them, and I plan to write a case study about the process of finding a niche and monetizing a new site.