Surviving the recession

I pretty much dropped out of domaining during the worst of last year's recession and am only just starting to get back into it. For a while I thought I'd have to ditch a considerable percentage of the portfolio, but I just managed to keep it together and came out with the portfolio largely unscathed. Parking still doesn't pay very well and I still don't see myself back in domaining in the conventional way. I'm moved from investing into developing and am currently developing out many of my domain names into small sites.

My target is 5 page sites for the better names, with 1 or 2 pages for the less interesting names. That's to get them started, I'm monitoring the sites with a combination of Piwik, Google Analytics and once I get ads on them Adsense's  reporting.

So far I've done or had done about 60 sites to an initial state, although still needing prettying up and adding photos. While none of them are anything to write home about, many of them are turning into solid little sites that I'll continue building out. So far the best looking one I have is Hot Cross Buns, hardly high art, but solid and easy to monitor. My mantra of the moment is "monitor, monitor, monitor" and by doing that and feeding back what I learn into the process I'm learning how to do them faster and better.

It will be interesting to see over time what effect having real sites makes to my domain empire, and how I react to it. During the worst of the recession I pretty much stopped buying, I'm now back acquiring a few domains, but at the moment pretty much only names that I intend developing in the very near future.