Many of us have domains that we never use. I personally have a couple of hundreds of them that I never got a chance to do anything with. Domains are not as expensive as they were 10 years ago. But their costs do add up if you have enough of them sitting in your account. Your domains are assets for your business. They can bring you more business and come handy with new projects. If you have a highly brandable domain, you may even get to sell it for a decent amount of cash.

Deciding what to do with idle domains is not that easy. Doing nothing with them is not the best idea though. Here are 6 things you can do with them:

• sell them: you can’t sell every domain for a decent amount of money. But studying sites such as flippa should give you some ideas. You would be surprised what people make for brandable domains. If you add some content to your website and get ranked for top keywords on major search engines, you can make even more money.
• host a blog on them: you feel you can handle a few more blogs? The more quality blogs you have, the more your revenue potential will be. Besides, you could have an easier time selling an established blog than an unused domain.
• create a product around them: I have seen many top bloggers use this approach. They usually register a bunch of domains and use them one by one as they create new products. Why pay to buy expensive domains when you can register some for cheap today to use later.
• park them: this is something we have had the least success with. But there are some folks who are making a decent amount of change by parking their portfolio of domains. It is an idea worth testing if you do not have the resources to add original content to your domains.
• prepare them for future launches: search engines do pay attention to the age of your domains and the content on them. You may not be ready to build a business on all your domains just yet. Adding some content to them once in a while and getting your domains indexed is not a bad idea though. It will save you time when you are ready for your next project.
• ditch them: this is the practice I use for my lousy domains. Many of us have registered lousy domains in the past. Keeping these domains in your portfolio won’t be that much of a use. Just ditch them and save yourself time in the process.

What do you usually do with your unused domains?

In the past few weeks, I have covered multiple ways bloggers can go about starting a Q&A section for their website. One does not have to be a genius to see why this could be a killer feature for a blog. Websites such as MakeUseOf have taken full advantage of their Q&A system to come up with new post ideas and get their community more involved. Adding a Q&A section to your website can not only help increase your traffic, it can open new doors of opportunity for you.

Need more reasons to justify adding such a feature to your website? Here are 6 reasons creating an answer website makes sense:

• Turn questions into blog posts: many top portals use this approach. People can post their questions to your website. You can choose the best questions and turn them into a blog post. You can even use the answers provided by your community members to reward your active readers.
• Better engage community: what’s the purpose of a Q&A website? To better engage and solidify your community. New Q&A sites may not get a lot of action from the get go. But as soon as you have 100 to 200 questions in your database, your site will start getting more attention. Some people have questions. Some others love to provide the answers. Your Q&A site can act as a platform between the two groups.
  
• Search engine benefits: depending on the type of platform you use for your Q&A website, you may get some SEO benefits from your efforts. Wouldn’t it be nice if questions from your Q&A site started ranking high on Google?
• Increase your revenue: your Q&A section can get your visitors more engaged and increase your traffic too. The more time people spend on your website, the more chance you have of getting them to click on your ads or buy something from your affiliate links.
• Get ideas for your blog posts: my favorite reason to start a Q&A website. By looking at what your community members are asking about, you can come up with new ideas for your blog. The good news is you already know where the demand is thanks to your Q&A community.
• Sell your Q&A site: blogging is not going to make you a millionaire unless you are a superstar. Developing domains and selling them for profit is a smart idea. For this to work, you are going to need to keep your Q&A section separate from your main domain (unless you don’t mind selling your blog with it as well).

Starting a Q&A website is not that easy. You are going to have to moderate questions and help your visitors get answers to their questions. But it all can be very rewarding in the end.

These days it’s very tough to find a blog domain that is easy to remember and brandable. Most straight forward domains seem to have been taken. After all, there are a lot of domainers out there that take pleasure in registering all kinds of domains only to sell them for huge profits in a short period of time. But there are tools out there that can help you find those hidden gems of domains that are still available. Nomaine is one of those tools. It’s a theme-based domain finder engine that can find you a decent domain (depending on your niche).

Nomaine is very easy to use. All you have to do is choose from the selection of themes available, define min and max limits for your domain and add your prefix and suffix words to optimize your results. The engine will go to work for you and searches for domains that are still available for pick up. The advantage of using this tool is that it can find you a general domain that applies to your niche. Keyword-based engines can be frustrating to work with and are often not that effective. With this tool, you can save time and find domain names that usually wouldn’t find with other tools.

The bad news is that the themes available on this websites are limited. So if your niche is not included in the above list, you are probably out of luck. But if your theme is included, there is no reason you can’t find a brandable domain that you could use to build a killer website. All in all, Nomaine is a cool domain name finder tool that could come handy for new bloggers.

Finding a domain like ProBlogger is going to be difficult these days. A lot of people own multiple domains these days, and it’s just not easy to find a decent domain that is not taken. That’s why you are going to need a tool that opens your eyes to domain ideas that you may not thought about. A domain tool that can combine words relevant to your niche can be a handy tool. Thankfully, there are plenty of these tools around, but here are 5 that stand out:

DomainsBot: my favorite domain finder. It’s completely Ajaxified and makes it easy to get ideas for your domain. It also has advanced features that you can use to come up with even more ideas.

Domize: an innovative domain search tool that lets you use enumerations and lists to build up killer domains fast. Once you read the instructions and learn the rules, the sky’s the limit with this service.

Domainr: an innovative domaining tool that not only finds you available domains based on your keyword phrase but also those international domains that are highly brand-able. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find a cool domain name such as “bit.ly.”

Domain Pigeon: another cool domaining tool that is great for developing ideas for your next killer domain. It provides you with not only available domain names but also twitter names as well. Who would have thought your Twitter name could become almost as important as your domain name?

Dot-o-mator: a simple but very useful domaining tool that can help you come up with some killer Web 2.0 type domain names for your blog, startup, or even forum. It’s compatible with iPhone as well. Great tool for Web 2.0 fans.

There are a few other domain tools that you can use to generate ideas. At the end of the day, your goal should be to find a domain name that is short, to-the-point, and gives you the opportunity to use it for branding purposes in the future. If you are stuck, the above tools will come in very handy.