Michael Gilmour BSc, MBA and entrepreneur for the last 30 years.

We manage the traffic to just over 1 million domains for clients and from experience I would head down the either of three routes:
1. Park the domain - you should get around 20RPM or about $800/month in revenue. This is an easy solution but destroys a lot of the value in the website.
2. Sell the spots to advertisers on a monthly basis. I do this with my own blog and make around $30K/year with little effort.
3. Insert video and other advertising into the website. You'll probably max out around 15RPM but you maintain the sites presence.

I hope that this helped you out.

From my experience it's better to setup the IP company as a completely separate entity. There can then be a contractual relationship between the OP company and the IP company.

This will assist in protecting the IP in the case of any legal action against the OP company. For instance, if the OP company is sued due to "bad advice" then the IP is not part of the law suit. The challenge then is to ensure that the directors of the both companies are different.....as any law suits of this nature often end up throwing the directors in as well!

This structure gives you the greatest amount of flexibility in your business in the event of a sale. Quite often a purchaser wants the IP but not any of the potential liabilities (or skeletons) of the OP company. You can sell the IP company off as a clean entity and gracefully close down the OP company.

I wish you all the best in the venture!

The first thing that I'd do is a SWOT analysis. What are Strengths of your idea (eg. it's completely unique), what are the Weaknesses (eg. technical problems), Opportunities (eg. market size) and Threats (eg. competitors).

This will help form the basis of your thinking in developing a business plan around which a key component is the cashflow. You can do all of this without actually spending large sums of cash.

Lastly, in my own company we have a saying, "Build the rusty mini-bike before the Harley Davidson." In other words, do everything manually and don't automate a thing and see if your idea actually works as a business concept. I've seen too many businesses try and build the ultimate solution right out of the gate only to discover that they didn't actually have a market for the product.

Whatever you do.....define the rusty mini-bike and work out the cycle from advertising, through to customer purchasing your product/service. Most importantly.....are they coming back.