The annual renewal fees for domain names become painful when you have enough of them. With the rampant speculation in good domains a developer must buy names when they become available. However, it is really easy to buy more domains, and not so easy to develop websites on them. As a result it is easy to have several hundred domains waiting for development and earning no income.
We like to put “place holder” sites on most of the domains we are holding for development. By this I mean we host the site and write a page or two of content about what our plans are for the eventual development. With a link from one of our other sites the search engines find the new site and the site gets indexed.
These sites don’t have enough content to rank well, but they let the search engines know there are plans in process and provide clue as to what the content will eventually contain. In the future, when the site gets built out this will help to avoid the “sandbox” and perhaps let the site rank better, sooner.
There is also some pruning which needs to be done. Domains that were purchased for projects that didn’t develop, domains that look dumb in retrospect, and assorted other mistakes should be allowed to expire.
That leaves some that require more difficult decisions. For example, we have collected quite an assortment of domains related to pictures and photos. When first registered three years ago the idea of selling our pictures online seemed promising. We built place holder sites, wrote some content and let them site.
Now the world is awash in digital photos. Digital cameras are very cheap and anyone can take pictures and publish them on Flickr or some other online site. Regular people even publish videos by the millions. I think some talented photographers will be able to sell their photographs, but I don’t see much potential for the gifted amateur photographer.
On the other hand, I hate to let domains that have been established for three years and may even have a little page rank expire. I figure renewal and a years hosting for a tiny site is about $8.00 so it doesn’t take much to make it worth holding a name for another year.
I have also had the experience of letting names drop only to realize later that was a big mistake. So the tendency is to spend more than I should on domain renewals.