Yes, I LOVE .infos.  They are now about $2 each, so they aren’t quite as juicy as they used to be, but I still use them exclusively. (Use Ebates.com to get 10% back on your GoDaddy purchases – every little bit helps.)

Here’s my take on the .infos vs. expireds….

I first started using .infos about 2 or 3 months into my maging.  The problem I ran into was the “waiting” for the expireds to drop into my account.  I wanted to build sites NOW, not in a few days.  So I experimented with a few.

So, advantage number 1 is that .infos are immediate.  I can have a few spare moments, go buy several domains and have sites built less than an hour later.

Advantage #2 – expireds are now running around $20.  Even with the price increase in .infos, I can still get 10 sites for the price of one, right?

Advantage #3 – TIME!  Time is money.  If I have to spend 2 hours looking for and checking on ONE expired, imagine how many .infos I could buy in that amount of time.

Advantage #4 – Keyword rich.  It’s fine that expireds don’t have keywords in the domain name. But, if you CAN have it in there, it’s all that much better.

So you can see all of these things lead me to loving .infos.  But what about the return and what’s considered decent?

Once you’ve built lots of sites, you can get really fast at it.  I can build 5-15 an hour depending on the size of the keyword list (I also build multiples in a niche at once – this saves time too).  So, let’s say on the low end, I build 5 in one hour.

Do the math – $10 for domains (5 x $2 each), Hosting for a year – ~$60 (5 sites x 12 months x $1/month – I typically budget $1/site/month – although usually get much better return than that).  So that’s $70 cost, and one (maybe two) hours of my time.  My .infos typically average $50-100 a year.

Now, $4 a month per site might not seem like much.  But if you’ve just built 5 sites, you are looking at $250-$500 a year in revenue – for $70 cost and 1-2 hours of time.  And remember, this is using numbers of extreme – sometimes I build way more than 5 an hour, sometimes a site will do extremely well and blow those numbers away.

Here’s a screenshot of my first 10 .infos (built almost 2 years ago) for the period 8/23/2010 through 8/23/2011.

(click image to see larger version)

That’s exactly a year and you’ll see that they made $40 – almost $900.  Those 10 sites total almost $2000 for the last year (and they had another almost whole year before that).  Not bad for the amount of time I put in them.

So what it boils down to is being efficient with time. See the post linked below (Speed and Efficiency) for more information.

I basically follow Greg’s strategy, and I don’t do much, if any, backlinking anymore.

Here are some related posts and resources:
Expired Domains vs New Domains Series (written in December 09, so some thoughts/facts/numbers may have changed):
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Speed and Efficiency When Building Mage Sites

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GoDaddy – for domains, of course!  .Infos are typically $1.99 – sometimes you can get them on sale for 49cents!