Monetizing Unused Domain Names: Selling you on the idea

Many of us own domain names that aren't in use. There's minimal cost in buying a domain name and tales of big payoffs are familiar to many of us. Each year when you have to renew those domain names you're caught in a sense that you're wasting away ~$10 x #of domains per year.

You probably had an idea of what could be done with the domain name when you got it, but that plan would involve months, teams of information architects, designers and developers. It would be great if there were an easy way to get things going: monetize the domain name, see if there's interest, gradually test out some of your ideas, and start building a community of site visitors. You can get things going in a fairly sophisticated fashion with minimal technical skills and no design skills by using Drupal. Obviously, you're not going to build something beautiful and unique and exactly what you envisioned. But you can do quite a bit almost for nothing in minimal time and get your site going.

Best practices for Drupal development would tell you to develop locally and use version control. This way you don't wreck your live site if you mess something up. You will need to learn to develop this way, but in the interests of getting going fast we're going to throw caution to the wind.

Drupal is a PHP/MySQL system, so you'll need a hosting plan that supports it. You won't need root access, and at least initially you can work on a pretty junky shared hosting plan. Most people use Linux or similar operating systems for hosting. We'll get going step by step next time.