Hey guys..... After reading the financial success thread, I thought it might be a nice idea if people who have been around domains for a bit took a minute or two or three to share one or more tips.
I'll get the ball rolling and hopefully others will chime in
Try and not be a jack of all trades when it comes to domains unless you have incredibly deep pockets to begin with. Try focusing instead on a few areas. Ones you can learn about inside and out. This makes it easier to get SOME kind of momentum going, to maximize sales opportunities, to maximize monetization possibilities, to be able to spot good deals on the acquisition side, to be able to purchase domains at a fair price that you can make an immediate profit on because you know how to best monetize or you have the benefit of volume.
My best tip would be to read read read.... If you dont know the newest and latest news or sales information, you dont know whats hot... you wont know what kind of domains to attack and you'll find your always one step behind everyone else... Try to have the forsight to see whats ahead and beat your fellow domainers to it...
Instead of buying hundreds of names at reg fee - buy 1 solid generic name with traffic (preferably .com - be sure to avoid TMs). Park the name, save the monthly revenue, and then use the money to buy another name with traffic. If you sell the occasional domain, again, use the money to buy another name with traffic. Keep repeating and you will have solid portfolio and steady income.
"Follow the traffic. Follow the money" -Frank Schilling
A good tip i picked up in another thread a while back:
Try to spread your renewal dates as much as you can, it sucks to let domains go that you don't want to let go simply because the total of renewals in one month is to much to cope with.
Try to get the highest possible rev share from your PPC providers. Sometimes all you have to do is contact your account manager and ask politely. Other times you can "negotiate" a higher bonus for parking revenues by promising to move revenue domains that are currently parked at a competitor.
It doesn't hurt to ask, and you could find yourself making anwhere from 10% to 40% more revenue each month simply by inquiring about an upgrade.
For people starting out especially, scrutinize each and every potential name you get. For every 100 names I considered good and worth registering, I registered the best 1-3 names only. Remember that there are millions upon millions of domains listed out there for sale, so for yours to stand out, they must be the best of what you can find, not just names that seem good. Yes, that means you're going to have to do a lot of research and name searching in order to build a portfolio, but it helps keep you from spending too much, from getting too many "fluff" names that really are worth reg fees or little more to most people, and ultimately you wind up just using time vs. money upfront. Then after you achieve success, you can switch it up, only buy a few names vs. registering a couple hundred, and you will be spending money to more or less save yourself time and energy and allow yourself to focus more on a couple of premium quality names vs. hundreds of okay registered ones, which can include possibly developing on one of those premium names. I'm still in transition with this myself. :P
Also, IMO if you're going to use a website to promote your own names, pick a good name to have it on. Time and time again I see people with their domains for sale on a site on an ugly domain, and they don't realize it would be akin to an interior designer working out of a poorly-designed office!
BTW, good thread Sharon...tips threads are always good and useful to people, and I like Paxton's tip and may try it out on some parking companies.
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I've found PremiumDrops very useful recently. Costs nothing to join. It slows down a lot but I think that part of this is because it is so popular. Join it and test it out while it's still free!
I very much agree with NameTraders "Find 100 good domains, Only register the best" philosophy. With reguard to unregistered and dropping domains, I'd also say it is useful to develope techniques so that you do that in a concentrated period so that the best are still there when you decide to get them.
Don't get too upset about the opportunities you miss. Learn from them. Nobody wins all the time. In life, you often have to lose before you win.
Buy names you like. It's just more enjoyable that way. Don't buy names you don't like just because lots of other people do.
Work out your strengths and how you can apply them to domains. Work out your weaknesses and how you can get others to help you.
Patience. You get your good months and your bad months. Spend your good months preparing for your bad months.
Thanks for contributing to this thread guys. Some great ideas!
I wanted to make my own additions to what others have said:
domainspade: I agree with this.... and this goes along with my suggestion of focusing in specific niches. This makes researching a lot easier.
One simple and free tool I like is Google Alerts. You can subscribe to any hits on news with specific terms. You will then get emails as news is available matching those terms. Just be careful of how broad your search terms are otherwise you might find yourself inundated with emails that aren't relevant.
Minion: I agree with the idea of cash flow focus... the only challenge is it is getting a lot more expensive to follow this strategy than it was before. The deals ARE there, but it takes more legwork than it used to.
Paxton: yup.... I should probably do this myself. I have domains parked all over the place in an effort to get highest rev per domain.... I'm sure if I went with one place, I'd be able to negotiate better rates and make more overall. I'm just lazy about changing name servers. :P
Nametrader: One domain sold for $2k to an end user works out to needing to sell 1 in 285 domains a year to break even on reg/renewals. That's without monetization of the domains. Over that, it is profit. There are 2 problems for most people: they aren't focused enough on end user to pick domains that they can sell at end user pricing and when they do get interest, they sell a domain for too little to get a sale rather than to hold out for more money OR they have unrealistic expectations of what they can get for a domain. (BTW this wasn't to say YOU weren't good at selecting domains... I was talking in general terms here of people that register any-domainthat-sellz.com and expect to sell THAT for 20k ) Then again, its getting increasingly difficult to get cash flow domains for reg fee that don't have potential tm issues. I guess it comes down to knowing your strengths, having objectives and having a solid plan for building a portfolio - whatever it is comprised of.
Damion - or alternately move your domains to one registrar that allows you to stagger your renewal dates.
Zoki - absolutely! I use a database and have different views for it. One of the views is by expiration date so I can easily see what is due for renewal now and what is coming due. I'm also starting to track more info now than I used to. For example, number of end user inquiries, offering price, running to date costs for the domain (ie acquisition+ renewals), etc. Excel is fine if you are managing a smaller number of domains but if you are dealing with a large volume of domains, multiple registrars etc, using a database with tables for registar account info, parking info etc makes it easier to manage everything.
There are some great tips in this thread!
Thank you Sharon for starting it.
After a year of buying domain names, (and having fun doing
it), I'm facing all the renewal fees on domains I shake my
head at now
I must say the advice from MinionDH, and 100% agree
with, take that money and invest in a generic traffic name.
I can't help thinking I'd be farther ahead had I thought of
that myself last year!
Agreed! You'll never get anywhere without taking some sort of risk or making a bold move.
However, you should do as much homework as possible and not go into something blind - so I also agree that you should be taking calculated risks. At least if you fail, you will know that you did everything in your power to calculate your investment.
Be extremely persistent. This is the most important quality I can stress, in any sort of business. Keep looking for deals and continue in trying to innovate the industry. As long as you're persistent enough, your gem will come calling. It's very frustrating at first to see some people on here making these big deals when you first get in the game, but that could easily be an newbie out there with some time, effort, and a little luck !
I also agree with putting all your initial capital in a .com with traffic/revenue and start from there. Keep your day job and throw in your extra savings towards traffic/rev names and watch your earnings grow, month after month.
Get creative with how you monetize your names - try all the parking providers - the difference can be HUGE. Don't be afraid to try out some affiliate programs out there. Parking Empire offers some great deals from the looks of it and I'm getting excited to try out (btw, no affiliation with them at all) Affiliate commissions will likely dwarf your parking earnings, even with a fraction of the clicks/traffic.
Before selling a domain, go to Sedo and other domain sites and try to find the asking price of similar domains. It doesn't hurt to know, and it may be a good price base.
Reasearch-Research and more Research And have alot of patience,Keep you goals within your reach, work very hard on the specific niche areas you are going to proceed in, I agree with sharon aswell, Don't be the jack of all trades, Focus on achieving one goal at a time, Don't stop just because you have success with that niche, Success means you need to stay with that one niche, and fully capitalize it's potential.
Hi,
thanks for this thread, really interesting.
I would like to add an advice: identify the best sectors in English domain names & buy them in other languages. If I take the example of France, we are about 10 years behind the US. But the trend is more or less the same and it is easy to grab good domain names at reasonable prices and mostly with high potential.
david
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Hundreds of resources and guides for domainers - Domainpredator.com
Any advice on managing all the domain names purchased? PremiumDrops seem nice, but there watch list maxes out at 100 domain names. And I don't think it was designed for managing ones existing stock of domains. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Go by instinct. Before regging/buying a domain, I think if I would start a site on that niche with that domain name, if I was doing business in that.
A simple strategy I use in choosing name is to keep a maximum of ONE thing to remember in a domain for the visitor. My idea is, with each additional thing you want the visitors to remember, more likely they are to forget the domain. The formula may not work always, but works mostly.
For ex.
Health.com (here zero items to remember specifically. health is generic & .com is the default extension)
NewYork.tv (ONE item to remember - extension tv)
Qlips.com (one item to remember - Qlips referring to Clips)
eArchitect.us (2 items to remember - extension & e. I wouldn't reg this.)
Galo.com ( One item to remember - brandable "Galo")
Nasty-Videos.com (2 items to remember. "nasty" & the hyphen)
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Before you regg a domain, think of it this way...if you were in the same industry, will you pay a few hundred dollars to buy the domain from yourself and will you use the same domain as your business website? If yes, then its probably worth the risk of $7.
Once u have regg the domain, use a service such as whypark.com or 1plus.net to park your name. Then build some content there by hiring a ghostwriter in Elance to write a few articles or you can write those yourself. Remember, the going rate is only $15-$20 per article about 600-800 words.
Submit your site to all search engines and remember to create a sitemap for better Google ranking.
Then submit those articles with very good signature files to as many article sites as possible. You will start earning some $$ and not share the earnings with parking sites(sedo, namedrive, etc)...meaning better earnings per click!
Your $7 domain will now start earning you some $$ and will eventually cover your regg fee for next year. If there are good offers for the domain, sell them and use the earnings to start buying generics. Once you have some good generics, put more $$ into developing your domains. My thought is mostly swayed towards developing the good ones and sell the so-so ones.
) Then again, its getting increasingly difficult to get cash flow domains for reg fee that don't have potential tm issues. I guess it comes down to knowing your strengths, having objectives and having a solid plan for building a portfolio - whatever it is comprised of.
